This OJ thing

My family has been touched by murder. I use the phrase lightly, and there is no recovery from the pain. We carry on, my mother died wondering if justice would be done. I have invaded governmental agent’s offices screaming for justice. I get routinely kicked to the curb; I’m a bad boy who doesn’t get the time of day from vacationers like Greta Van Susteren. The cops are covering something. I suspect a government snitch that does serial murder as a hobby. A PI hired back in the ‘80s got doors slammed in his face. Old colleagues told him to “mind his business”. In the 1990s, the .22 caliber killer fired shots at me, and ambushed my kitchen door, because I raised hell with the news media. I shoot back; I carry a Sig Sauer and know my range trajectories.

I have learned to live with murder.

This OJ thing is out of control. I watched this SOB get away with it in the ‘90s. He kind of faded away, as befits murderers. He owes the Goldmans $33,000,000. I don’t care what the jury said; the bastard is as guilty as the day is long.

Murderers escape justice. After 21 years, I am accustomed to the fact that my father will never be avenged. OJ is the most obvious murderer on the public radar. A question on “Mr. Bill’s” FOX website the other night didn’t include the “Hell no!” answer to the question of watching OJ.

Is this creepy, or what?

Maybe it’s just my being a bad loser—I like winning, and have suffered massive disappointment in the wisdom of the American people.

So, I gave up on election converge about 0630, and started listening to headbanger music. That was when I encountered yet another bizarre phenomenon. I sure it’s just coincidence, but my satellite provider renamed all of their music stations last night. What was “Power Rock” is now called l’inked, which sounds suspiciously illiterate. What was “Classic Rock” is now called “Rock Show.” “Light Classical” is now referred to as “Intermezzo.”

I know what an “Intermezzo” is. I can even sight-read music charts, which is pretty good for a drummer. We mostly go by instinct.

A call to the Dish Network this morning caught the service representative totally by surprise. The best he had to offer is “I’ll have to get used to change.”

I just thought it was peculiar that all the music stations on my “Favorites” list had been renamed following the Democrat victory and “a new direction for America”. I’m pretty sure this is just coincidence and overt paranoia on my behalf.

I still think it’s a harbinger of the future that my bedside phone died last night. Someone tried to call me about 2100. Follow-up calls today reveal that it wasn’t someone with a dying cell phone battery. Most likely it was a disaffected conservative.

I’ve had my say about the future of America. I think it’s totally creepy that my music stations got renamed on election night. There may be a Blue Oyster Cult or ELP CD somewhere in The Possum Den. The subwoofer is blown, and produces a most annoying buzz during movies. Does anyone have an e-mail for Boston Acoustics?

The morning after...

Well…I think it’s a dark day for America, but, that’s just me, as Seinfeld said. A couple of my liberal friends missed a great chance to pick my pocket for that $100 bill I routinely bet on the wisdom of the American people.

I am looking forward to a great deal of cynical amusement…right up until the moment when people start dying. Al Qaeda has TV in their caves, and I can hear the celebratory AK-47s all the way down here in Georgia.

Those People are swearing they desire reconciliation and an end to partisan politics. Those vows will last until a certain wild-eyed harridan is installed as Speaker of the House. Then the truth will come out, in a blizzard of indictments, investigations, and governmental gridlock.

The only upside is that this Pyrrhic victory is a last hurrah. Two years; 24 months. People are going to die when the terrorists get cranked up and renew their assault on America. The record high stock market will collapse under Charlie Rangel’s new tax burdens. By the time 2008 rolls around, I expect the American people to have come to their senses and realized that Democrat socialism is not the way of the future. That $100 bill is still there.

Someone sent a succinct e-mail to FOX News this morning: “We’re doomed!”

I don’t know that I’ll take it that far. According to local referenda, I can smoke pot, but I can’t marry another man. (Eww! As my daughters would say.) I have chronic neuropathy in my legs, and stem cell research might help a bit, but the ethical considerations are over the top. I feel bad for Michael J. Fox, but not one fetus should be created and destroyed for our sake. My wheelchair works just fine, and I’d rather be a slave to this contraption for the rest of my life than live with fetal murder.

One bright light on the western horizon is that Der Arnold won reelection. We need to do away with that antiquated law about only natural-born citizens being eligible to election as president. I don’t think Old Europe is going to run a ringer in on us after 200 years, and I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone besides the Austrian movie star I’d rather have in the White House.

I hate it that people are going to die when the terrorists become emboldened by the liberal coup d’etat and make another run at America. Today’s Democrat victory may not be the end of the world; this is a strong nation, and we can survive two years of socialism.

This may work out in the long run. I want to see how Those People behave in the next two years. I don’t expect a great deal, and their “regime change” promises endless amusement until the next terrorist attack. Like a movie ticket, the tax increase may be worth the price of admission.

Vote early and often!

I wish I could be an accomplished hacker. 14-year-old kids can invade HAL 9000 with impunity, but I get the shakes doing a simple disk clean-up.

I faced one of the new-fangled electronic voting machines today. No big deal; it’s built like a Tonka toy, so we can all be user-friendly. I did my civic duty, and put up my simple vote for people that I hope will do their best for America. It’s my right; it’s my privilege, and I’ve said for years that if you don’t vote, don’t complain. Nothing is more fatuous than hearing a gripe from someone who didn’t take the time to vote, but has an opinion on a political leader.

I wish I knew how to be a hacker. Despite the user-friendliness of these new machines, it raised the hair on the back of my neck. There is no paper trail. Maybe it’s just an instinctive distrust of computers. If the Dems win the race today, it will be a valiant victory for American politics. If they lose, it will be “the culture of corruption” stealing yet another election from their sweaty hands.

10,000 lawyers are standing by.

If Dems lose big, I want to hear the accusations against the electronic voting machines. Those People swore the last election was “stolen” because of lack of those electronic devices. I can’t wait for the squealing of “culture of corruption” when Nancy Pelosi doesn’t get her promised Speaker’s seat.

This why I want to learn hacking. That big electronic thing scared me. I want to be 14 years old again, and inject that sophomoric point of view into a national election. I want the ability to invade a computer, and skew its count with no paper trail.

I don’t care who wins today. Democrats will bring a rain of ruin and destruction; Republicans will keep on keepin’ on, with an occasional scandal about an ignominious homosexual. My Libertarians are looking more viable all the time.

If the Dems lose, they’ll swear the election was “stolen”. I have already gone on record describing the “$100 paperweight.” I always bet on the sheer sense of the American people. I don’t lose.

Those voting machines scare me. There may be some computer-literate 14-year-old lurking out there. Early reports are in, and I guarantee if this election day doesn’t work out the way Those People hoped, we’ll go back to penciling in our choice.

The Chinese proverb kicks in: “Be careful what you wish for!”

Getting up at 0400

I caught more heat for lighting a cigarette than I did for being squeamish about Saddam Hussein’s death sentence. Wow!

Try living with a nicotine addiction and a sleep disorder. I routinely wake at 0400. Sometimes, if you wake early in the morning, you can see terrorists crashing airliners into tall buildings.

I like the morning news. It tells me the world hasn’t ended yet.

I got up at 0400 for this?

Wow, gee whiz. A tyrant faces the hangman’s noose. Ramsey Clark gets thrown out of court, and Saddam is steadfast to his “Ace in the Hole” reputation.

I got out of bed at 0400 to hear this unsurprising news? This dictator had a troubled background; so have we all, and it doesn’t excuse this:

That child is dead. I don’t look forward to people counting the days until they swing me; I like the idea of passing quietly in my bed on some unspecified night. As the Bible says, some night my fool’s soul will be demanded.

I can go easy. I haven’t murdered children. Perhaps the spectacle of a mass murderer waving a holy book was worth the price of waking at 0400. There is an appellate process to pass through, but I don’t think the Iraqi people will settle for less. Saddam says he wants a firing squad, but a march to the gallows seems appropriate.

That judge looks like a tough dude. I’ve been before the bench, mostly for driving too fast. I wouldn’t want that feller passing judgment on me! I pay enough in traffic fines!

Scary stuff

I suppose I owe a number of my constant readers an apology. After the stress and anguish of establishing not one, but two alternate blogs to that which was destroyed by the Google monster, I took an entire week off from the Internet. Despite my Irish-Polish background, I am an honorary member of the Cherokee tribe, and like my fellow Injuns, I can not only be politically incorrect by saying “Injuns”, but if some matter requires a great deal of pondering, I can take as much time as I please to consider my next response. I did not always have this luxury during my working days, so it is a double blessing as I get nearer the end than the beginning. I hope I didn't sign on at another another ICQ [“I seek you”] network. I don’t want to be sought. I came in here like gangbusters, posting an old picture of my ambulatory days, and bitching and moaning about the unfairness of Google for eating my two-year-old blog. Then I bailed for a few days. Sorry ‘bout that, gang. To the credit of all my constant readers, no one poked me with some fatuous jibe that I owe my readers anything. I owe my daughters the safety and freedom to live their lives as they see fit; I owe my ex-wives the allegiance I declared to my younger: “I still love your Mom… I just don’t like her much any more.” I promised…er, suggested, something about the scariest gunfights Hollyweird has managed. Otherwise, no one has anything coming.

In descending chronological order, the scariest gunfights are:

Westerns:
Open Range
Unforgiven
The Long Riders
The Wild Bunch
The gunfight scenes in Shane

Contemporary:
Heat—the botched bank robbery escape.
About 90 seconds of Pulp Fiction.
The showdown in Mimi Rogers’ apartment in Someone to Watch Over Me.
James Caan’s last scenes in Thief, and his general demeanor throughout the movie.
All of Robert Duval’s scenes in Apocalypse Now
The last scenes of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

At least one director overlaps here: Sam Peckinpah. This emotionally tortured man was a combat Marine during War II; that counts for more than all the slow-motion mayhem he reveled in. Walter Hill, in his skillful directing of those many sets of brothers in “The Long Riders”, stole a lot of Peckinpah’s slo-mo mayhem. The reason his [mostly] accurate account of the Northfield, Minnesota raid makes my list is because of a minor touch added during the editing: I don’t know where they got the tape loop, but there is the constant sound of a horse screaming, or a mule neighing in slo-mo, when the guns start going off. It is blood-chilling to the max.

The rest of my humble list is compiled for two reasons:

(1) They mix the guns loud. Modern, digitalized Hollywood will never get it right. It’s all about sound compression now, and even a Glock, Browning, or S&W .40 caliber sounds like a cap gun. The sound has to fit the theatre, or something. There was an acid test for my kids. I know how to mix movie blood; it’s food coloring and corn oil. I’d mix one pint, and pour it on the linoleum kitchen floor… one pint…the human body contains ten pints of blood. “Multiply this times ten, and now tell me how you feel about violence.”

One daughter says I’m “a death merchant” [her words, accumulated from public school indoctrination; not mine]; the other gets as much range time with me as I can manage. I’m getting old; did I do right? It seemed to have an effect on the kids; they eschew violence, but like true cowgirls, they know what may have to be done when things go very badly.

If you set a high-velocity, high-caliber firearm off in an enclosed room, it will rock your world. Forget the individual you may or may not have shot; the act of pulling the trigger will set your world on edge. Don’t send in questionnaires asking how I acquired this knowledge; think of me as a used car salesman, and trust me. I was never a cop, and never played one on TV, but I know these things. I confess to the TV and movie thing. As relates to the movies, when someone is shot, they do not explode in blood... It appears quite naturally.

(2) The other factor: It is so mundane. The reasons Open Range, and to a lesser degree Unforgiven make my personal list, is that the gunfights are matter-of-fact. The most terrifying thing someone can face is someone else exercising lethal force, and damn you if you’re in the way.

“They” have a phrase for it in these crank-up days of the 21st century.

“Suicide by cop.”

This is all extremely subjective. The real-life equivalents of Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill’s shoot-outs are impressive to a movie buff, and a former performer. Michael Mann is tapped into a vein of evil, ambiguity, and humanity that I cannot describe. Ridley Scott runs a close second.

I tend to be somewhat cryptic; like other ‘60s flower children, I have the bad habit of assuming others are thinking what I might speak.

I don’t think a Democritter is worth a nickel more than a Republican. Democritters want my tax money to give it to an undeserving species of perceived liberal voters, i.e. the “plantation slaves"; Republicans want my tax bucks to enforce some bizarre morality, i.e. “the ‘moral’ majority”. Both are equally wrong. I tend to vote for Republicans when the issues are pedal-to-the-metal; would-be moral arbiters tend to disappoint me less than clueless descendants of my generation’s flower children. I ain’t a cut-‘n-run Libertarian. I reject the party line; that we never shoulda done this Iraq thing. Hindsight’s quick and easy, like my first wife.

Well, we done it, so let’s clean this hellhole up and start the hairy eyeball on Iran and that greasy Korean dude. I have some cuss words boiling over for the so-called “crucial” election, too. This next-to-nothing isn’t about politics, at least not in the touted sense of a national referendum. There is plenty to follow before next Tuesday’s elections. I have a surprising endorsement to make therein. I felt a personal responsibility that I owed my three constant readers a post at this new blog site. I am too late for Hallowe’en. The notion of going on record as to personal frights is a highly subjective notion. Again, it is best not to inquire too closely, but I have seen the results of gunfire-related trauma, up close and personal, and it lacks the drama of Hollywood. One second there is nothing; the next second there is blood and screaming.

The most effective approach employed by Hollywood is (a) gunfights are louder than 32-track Dolby™ will capture, and

(b) bullets will whiz by and strike with amazingly little drama. For my subjective self, this is the true terror. For me, the scariest gunfights that Hollyweird has ever tried to re-create are the most underplayed, and the noisiest. This trumps all the slasher movies ever made.

Hill and Peckinpah were regarded as masters of slow-motion mayhem. They were trying to capture on film the phenomena commonly called “time compression”. Anyone who has ever endured an auto accident knows this sensation: you either remember every last excruciating detail in slow motion, or your mind has thankfully erased it. The latter are the lucky ones; those who remember everything have passed through time compression. If you have a differing list of scary Hollyweird efforts at recreating gunfights, I’m always open to correction and suggestion. I have left off such noteworthy attempts as Ridley Scott’s Blackhawk Down and Kirk Russell’s valiant support of Val Kilmer in Tombstone.

The latter caught the frenetic hell of history being made in less than a minute; over 60 rounds were fired in that Arizona town in less time than it takes to tell it. My benchmark for judging the technical accuracy of a cinematic gunfight is the deployment of magnesium “squibs” to denote bullet strikes. I don’t know who first had this bright idea, but it has detracted from any element of drama a director could wish to introduce, ever since such squibs were first deployed. That’s another element that makes my list of Hollyweird gunfights so personally scary; it doesn’t look like kids playing with sparklers on the 4th of July. People simply pulled the triggers, and loud noises and death happened.

Some of cinema tries hard, and some go for stylization to emphasize drama. No one has ever gotten it right. I don’t think anyone ever will, and so I’ll try to suspend reality and let the directors who know “less-is-more” continue to disturb my dreams. Happy belated Hallowe’en, y’all! It’s hard to think of “trick or treat” without thinking of radical Islam in possession of nuclear devices.

I hope my old friends have hung in here, and I hope new readers will stay tuned for more rock ‘n roll from Uncle Possum. A few minutes of decent food and decent sleep ought to do the trick. When I’m not listening to my beloved Russian classical composers, I’m dosing on headbanger music. Megadeth is an especial favorite, and after 36-48 hours of wakefulness, I keep hearing their heavy metal chant of “Insomnia”.

“Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying?” Indeed!

I thought I'd relocated, but a link takes me...

...here.

Okay. I thought about running simultaneous blogs, and now it's a default happening. I have to maintain this account to comment to my friends. So, read it and weep, as they say:

I have an endorsement to make before next week’s elections. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I am urging everyone to vote Democritter.

Yah, you heard me correctly. Vote for the party of Hilly, John Edwards, and JoKe Kerry. Henry the Kat was right; all politics are local, but y’all know where your political pork is buttered. John Lennon, bless his deceased heart, was right…”Give peace a chance,”

I prefer Megadeth: “Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying?”…but…that’s just me, as Seinfeld said.

They don’t call this an “off-year” election for nothing. Give the Pelosis, Schumers, and their ilk one last run at power. Let’s cut and run on all military fronts, forget the booming economy that surpasses the Clinton years, and treat the Islamofascists like common pot dealers. Throw the border open; no one would dare bring a nuke into America, because we mean well. I want a congressional gridlock to equal the ‘90s and the death of the Contract with America! Impeach George Bush! I want a president who understands the nuances of “oral arguments”, and I definitely want my taxes raised to pay for the helicopters off the roof of the Baghdad embassy!

For all I despise about the French, they have one sound political philosophy: when faced with a lack of decent candidates, vote for the worst one. Society will survive this faux pas.

Give the Democrats their majority in Congress this year of our Lord, 2006. Grant them legislative gridlock, economic ruin, the impeachment of George Bush, who among many was never elected king, and the appeasement of the nuclear despots who desire our annihilation for no other reason than we exist as a Christian affront to radical Islam.

If we give the Democritters their way this year, in 2006, they will be totally marginalized by 2008. VOTE DEMOCRAT! Show them the inherent curse of the old Chinese proverb: “Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.”

My premature condolences go out to the survivors of future terrorist attacks. If you voted for Democrats, however, please don’t cry on my shoulder… the dampness is bad for my rheumatism.