Salad Is Slaughter

We’re going to see Brett Butler (star of the comedy Grace Under Fire) tonight at the San Jose Improv.  I don’t know who else is going to be appearing.  I’m looking forward to the show because I haven’t been to the San Jose Improv in a couple of months.  The last time was to see Gabriel Iglesias.  That was a pretty good show and he was funny, but he used too much Spanish.

The night out will be a nice break from doing work that brings in a paycheck all day, then going home and packing and lugging crap — I mean treasures — for several hours at night.  Last night’s CSI episode was the first time the TV has been on in two days.  Shameful.  The packing will soon be over, then we can look forward to lugging heavy furniture to storage, signing our lives away, lugging heavy furniture to the new house, lugging boxes to the new house, and unpacking.  And getting electric, water, DirecTV, and so on set up.  My life is planned out for months to come.

Technorati Tags: theater

Where is the Office of Homeland Security and why have domestic terrorists not been brought to justice?  A group of nut cases known as the Earth Liberation Front (EFI) has struck again (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,95447,00.html) and John Ashcroft and the Office of Homeland Security has not said word one about them.  This time EFI torched a bunch of SUVs to protest polluting vehicles and the people who buy them.  Back on August 1, they caused 50 millions dollars worth of damage with an arson fire in San Diego to protest “rampant urban development.”  EFI’s actions of course, created more pollution and harmed the environment more than the SUVs and the housing complex combined.

Is the Office of Homeland Security’s job only to prevent terrorist acts from brain-washed religious zealots, or is its job to protect the lives and property of Americans from terrorism no matter what the source?  Am I expecting too much from John Ashcroft, the man who lost an election to a corpse?

Alabama’s chief justice Roy S. Moore seems to be unaware that the Confederacy lost the Civil War in 1865 and that Alabama is still part of the United States.  If he does know that Alabama is one of the 50 United States, then I have to assume that he is aware that he and the state of Alabama is subject to federal law.

I presume that Justice Moore attended an accredited law school and as part of his studies he read the following:  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Maybe Judge Roy was sick the day the class covered the First Amendment, and he probably missed that question on the test.  Since he’s Alabama’s head judge, he might have heard about some of the cases that have gone before the United States Supreme Court dealing with the separation of church and state.  If Judge Roy has been doing his job, he might have read rulings like this from Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the Lee v. Weisman case in 1992:  “When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”

When Judge Roy unveiled his Ten Commandments monument, he said the monument depicts “the moral foundation of our law” and reminds “the judges … of this state, the members of the bar … as well as the people who visit the Alabama Judicial Building … that in order to establish justice, we must invoke ‘the favor and guidance of Almighty God.’”  What part of “make no law respecting an establishment of religion” didn’t you understand, Judge Roy?

Judge Roy refuses to take down his Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama State Supreme Court building even though a federal judge and a federal appeals court have ruled the monument is unconstitutional and must be removed.  It it’s not removed the State of Alabama will be fined $5000 per day.  Maybe they should take the money from the fine and use it to send Judge Roy to remedial law school classes.

While we were doing some work around the house this weekend, Janet turned the TV on to a movie playing on TBS – Die Hard Two.  There are two phrases I really hate to see on my television screen:  Edited for Television and Edited for Content.

Ignore for a moment that Die Hard Two is a really bad film.  When you replace words that may offend bible belt viewers you turn a bad action flick into a bad comedy.  The people who edited this movie for television tried to select words that matched the actor’s lip movements.  Substituting the word “shoot” for “shit” almost-but-not-quite worked (it was pretty funny), but the change that had me rolling on the floor with laughter was when they dubbed in the word “rascal” for the original word “asshole.”

Broadcast and cable channels regularly run disclaimers that the language in a program may offend some viewers.  Shouldn’t that be sufficient?  Apparently not.

Parents complain that they don’t want their kids exposed to that kind of language on TV.  Fine.  All cable boxes and satellite receivers have parental controls.  Use them.  Program the box to restrict your kid to Sesame Street and Spongebob.  Of course, kids will still hear MFer a few hundred times per day from their friends at school and from what they call music.  Will hearing the words “shit” and “asshole” warp their little minds even more?

Then there are the “adults” who write letters to the FCC because they heard the word “goddamn” on their television.  I have to assume that these people have more than one channel available to them and if they’re clever enough to figure out how to turn on the set, they’re clever enough to figure out how to switch the channel over to Pat Robertson or Jimmy Swaggart trying to con money out of old ladies.  There’s also the off switch if there’s nothing on that they like.  Here’s a suggestion – read a book.

Not all movies cater to your religious sensibilities.  You have a channel changer; use it. Not all programming is suitable for children; take responsibility for what your children watch.  Quit forcing sanitized crap on the rest of us.

Technorati Tags: television

I’ve been trying to get caught up reading about a year’s worth of Analog magazines.  I was laying in bed reading a story last night and it pissed me off.  The guy’s launch vehicle loses its primary drive and is in a degrading elliptical orbit.  He fired his maneuvering thrusters to try and raise his orbit.  But he fired them at perigee.  That’s just stupid.  Everyone knows that if you want to raise perigee you have to do a delta V at apogee.  Ruined the story for me.