I Am Not Above Writing Haiku

"Ha! They fly backwards!"

Sheltered boy ridicules birds

In brutal windstorm




Frosty gales attack

I hold you in my jacket

Are you warm as I?




Inside from blizzard

My head is powdered nicely

Momentarily




Heartfelt elegy

Penned by teenager mourning

Beautiful garbage

Baby!

I recently became an uncle. Which required no amount of work on my part, but still people congratulate me on it for some odd reason.

The real congratulations should be reserved, of course, for my sister, Melissa, who was introduced to the hardly magical experience of child-bearing. To omit details of her particularly unpleasant pregnancy, I just want to thank the Almighty for the mercy he extended me in giving me a penis instead.

Er, yes, so Baby's name is Kaitlin. Thus she is hereby presdestined to be The Kaitlin on her girl's soccer team. Her teammates will consist of The Kaylee, The Kayla, The Karli, The Katie, The Kaycee, The Kelsy, and The Kristi, to name some.

We were all pretty sure it was going to be a girl, but there were some doubts. Last year a psychic (I know) told Melissa a little boy was "trying to come into the world," so she and her boyfriend should be on their guard. OK, now fast-forward six months later to their sonogram appointment:

The science showed, on the contrary, a 75% chance of the baby having no gumdrops, and with the risk of offending Ms. Kathy Whitedove that's the analysis we went with. After seeing baby Kaitlin, my mom was not only elated with becoming a grandma, but also relieved that an eBay Sell-off Extravaganza of pink booties was now officially unnecessary.

My dad is another story. As much as he loves the little baby monkey, a 50th birthday and the new title of "Grandpa" within days of each other is one-two punch of pure mortal trauma. This is a pain that can only be relieved, they say, by having a Corvette. Which he already does -- it's been in the garage for over ten years, in fact. It's as if my dad has long prepared for "Mid-life Crisis 2: The Revenge," but we'll see if it helps any.

Whatever our personal situations are, we're all very happy that baby Kaitlin is thriving despite being dragged out 5 weeks premature. Also, if she is indeed my sister's daughter, it will mark the only time she will ever be early for anything.

Review: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

A-

This is a movie that almost nobody has ever seen, which is really a shame. It makes me write this review with all the more urgency even though it's been out on DVD for a few months now.

This movie's director (Shane Black) apparently wrote the original Lethal Weapon screenplay way back when, so he's no stranger to the buddy cop movie formula. In fact, I'll bet he's bloody sick of it, which is part of what makes Kiss Kiss Bang Bang so fresh and familiar at the same time.

Robert Downey, Jr. stays out of thesmokinggun.com long enough to play Harry, an East-Coast burglar who finds himself in LA for callbacks for a detective movie role. While being chased down by the NYPD, Harry stumbles into the audition room, where he is mistaken for one of the lined-up actors and is prompted to read from the script. With his pent up panic and a bullet lodged in his shoulder, Harry plays the role brilliantly in a nervous breakdown, and is then asked by the producer (Larry Miller) to come to Hollywood.

Harry's being screentested for the role of the detective, so the studio assigns him to tag along with a real life P.I. for research. He's paired up with the jaded tough guy Gay Perry (why can't a private dick be known for his skills as a detective? Anyway, he's played by Val Kilmer) who supplies the hard-boiled sarcasm that the movie burns like diesel fuel. Naturally, Perry's none too happy about babysitting Harry:

Perry: "Look up the word 'idiot' in the dictionary. Know what you'll find?"

Harry: "A picture of me?"

Perry: "No -- the definition of the word 'idiot', which you fucking are!"

It's been a long time since I've seen a movie this genuinely funny, even when it's playing on the old buddy-movie gag where one guy has all the bad luck throughout. I'll let you guess which guy that is in this case. The comedy involving Gay Perry, though, tends to rely too heavily on his being gay, but by Will & Grace standards the jokes are fairly versatile.

There's also Michelle "Is That Katie Holmes?" Monaghan playing the stereotypical but sharp aspiring actress, Harmony. Once the bodies start piling up, Harmony is more and more in her element since she was a lifelong fan of the gritty "Johnny Gossamer" detective novels, which had such flowery titles as "Die-Job" and "You'll Never Die in This Town Again." Her ability to improvise comes straight from her education in these books, and it saves Harry's skin more than a couple times.

The romantic game of tag Harmony and Harry play seems forced at certain plot twists, but it works because we learn their each other's best escape from the craziness around them. She's been around the block and he's a man-boy with flawed yet resolute principles about women; it's especially cute to watch how he handles a spider that crawls inside Harmony's bra when she's passed out.

Harry does the narration, which is where I see either see someone falling in love with the movie's charm or being turned off by its gimmicky smugness. At times Harry doubles back on the storytelling and apologizes because he screwed it up, but later he just lets the plot roll out, thankfully.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's strong dimension of satire, which attacks LA bitterly and lampoons hard-boiled novels lovingly, is where the intelligence of its comedy transcends most of its genre:

As Harry narrates "the case of the... the dead people in LA," he stings Hollywood for its impersonal social networks, damaged-goods women, and the laughable results of its citizens' acting dreams. These criticisms are nothing new, of course, but as things unfold we don't blame him for longing to go home to New York.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's plot is lifted from those Raymond Chandler serials, and everything from the loaded dialogue to the ridiculous strokes of fortune (and misfortune) pay homage to the campy days of noir. They also make most of the movie a bonafide riot.

I think at this point you get the idea that are plenty of people to whom I'd recommend this DVD, so as Harry would say:
"Don't worry, I saw the last Lord of the Rings. I'm not going to end this 17 times."

Puppies That Moo and Babies Who Listen to Tori Amos

The Gill Foundation is socking it to my town of Colorado Springs with a $900,000 campaign to "spark conversation" on homosexuality. Spearheading its media effort is a TV ad that tells the story of Norman, a dog that moos instead of woofs because "he was born different". This is meant as an analogy (though not a very good one) for the idea that people are born gay, but most folks couldn't tell just by the commercial alone.

The Born Different campaign claims that it's merely concerned with inciting discussion, not offering scientific proof about natural homosexuality. But that claim should puzzle you once you've perused their rather contentious Web site.

Hold on, let me get something out of the way:

I'm a theater-geek English major who spent a year living with four gay roommates: I know more gay folks than most gay folks. And to just state my current position and move on, my experiences and conversations lead me to believe that homosexuality is a combination of nature and nurture, and not a sin.

That's so you know where I'm at, but today I'm not going to focus on the ideas behind the Mooing Puppy but rather Focus on the Family's amusing response to it.

Instead of making any claim (at least in this particular spot) that even mentions gay rights, borndifferent.org has laid down a trump by superficially emphasizing the message "accept people who are different from you." See, you can't argue directly against that without sounding like a hateful prick, and that's just what makes it a winner in this case.

It's the same tactic behind naming the anti-abortion position "pro-life", or its opponents calling their camp "pro-choice". You're not anti-life, are you? If not, then you must be anti-choice... right? This sort of thing enables each side to hide behind its rhetorical wall and lob arguments past each other, making the debate hopelessly perpetual.

But Focus and other evangelical groups apparently don't see the trap that's laid out for them with Norman the Mooing Dog. With their expectedly direct attack on the ad, these guys are playing right into Born Different's hands by introducing Sherman the Dog That Woofs, Goddammit, Because Dogs Woof, Not Moo. It has that hateful-prickness, but by repeating the obvious without really addressing the issue, Focus ends up sounding more ridiculous than their opponents. But that's always been their style of debate ("marriage is between a man and a woman") and it does work on some people.

Still, some Christian parents are up in arms about Norman because they feel they can't keep their children safe from the ad's allegorical homosexual propaganda.

But this is a joke -- because the kids. Don't know. What the fuck. It's about.

They don't. Children don't know that Norman the Mooing Dog symbolizes homosexuals any more than they know Boxer from Orwell's Animal Farm represents the socialist proletariat. If kids are going to get its social implications, they have to ask Mommy and Daddy for them (assuming they're interested in anything beyond plot). Subsequently the parents can choose whether to tell them about Born Different's intended message or about the dire consequences of genetic bovine/canine hybridization. Their call. But that whole scenario is Born Different's intention in the first place. Oh, how sneaky!

What confuses me is how no one seemed to notice a previous TV spot from the Gill Foundation that could hardly be accused of sneakiness. This ad consisted of a gradual closeup on an infant while the female voiceover told us that this child was destined for a different life "because he was born gay." The spot had the rhetorical subtlety of a sledgehammer, and yet it failed to draw any pathos in the way of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, even watercooler talk for all I know.

I can understand someone feeling they were "subjected" to that heavy-handed ad, but by that same token the Mooing Dog must be doing these folks a favor by being so indirect. And while Norman's story has its obvious appeal to children, they still don't get it. It doesn't even have a subliminal impact on a kid's views of homosexuality, unless it has an intermittantly flashing frame of GAYS ARE BORN THAT WAY that I'm just not seeing. It just seems as if some parents are overestimating their tykes' ability to extract political allegory from a 20-second commercial.

I don't blame parents for being sensitive to what messages their offspring absorb everyday through the media -- that's their job and it only gets more difficult to do each year. But there comes a point where parents can project so much of their own gut reactions onto kids that it shatters logic.

"Why the Hell Aren't You On MySpace?"

Ever get that question?

This, of course, is assuming you've resisted the temptation to join that regime. In that case I'll bet some of these friends have probably threatened to sit you down at gunpoint as you tearfully create a profile against your will.

Yet, when you tell another group of people that you're not on MySpace, they tend to congratulate you. And these are often -- interestingly enough -- MySpacers as well.

These are the ones who are really ashamed, aren't they? When you tell them you found their page? It's like you caught them shopping at Walmart. They project that same kind of helplessness from their eyes that says, "I'm just a victim of the system."

Most of what I know about MySpace comes directly from these folks, and from observing the more hardcore users.

I gather that MySpace is The Blob -- except that once consumed in its bubbling mass, you don't digest away into a lifeless disassembly of bones (literally, I mean). Instead, you perpetually relive the last day of high school. Among other activities, this is where you try to amass as many yearbook signatures as possible, but in this case they are called "Friends".

Once established, the Friend, in most cases, will never contact you again. If and when it does happen, however, 80% of his/her comments run the literary gamut of "dude/girl, wtf! we should hang out!" or "hey i miss you" or the more intimately expressive "i fuckin miss you." Within two and six months later your Friend contacts you again to repeat the above, so on, so forth, and that's how college students all over the world can stay in touch using the World Wide Web.

"MySpace is different for each age group," said my 40-year-old uncle. He's actually made teriffic use of his profile, as it's helping him to rise from the ashes of his divorce. His profile declares that he's there for dating... and "friends" and "networking" (it really helps the dating aspect if you mention at least two other reasons for being there). But my uncle has been getting all kinds of warm responses from (hot) women his age because he's using the perfect datebait to lure them: photos of himself with his two adorable daughters. The man is in it to win it.

Now, I can't say that I looked at my uncle's online dating success without a tinge of envy. Granted, my friends have picked up some real CREATURES from that site, but I keep thinking I could do so much better than they. For one, I've developed internal alarms that warn me about clingy-emo-nympho-cutters, and besides, can't I just look at their blogs to verify those suspicions?

Which gets me thinking about the blogging aspect. And the increased MySpace traffic.

If you blog, too, it's because you want to be read, right? And unless your stuff's particularly private, don't you always wish you were read by more people than you already are?

I know this sounds like bullshit, but I like the writing more than anything else.

But I figure why not just do the same with a more accessible MySpace profile? Yeah! And add a custom wallpaper and all sorts of "Me" crap everywhere (that won't destroy people's eyes). And have them listen to a little song while they read my stuff, maybe, like "Shadow Stabbing" by Cake. Oh, I'll be damned if they don't like that.

I'm fondly envisioning all of this, and it is scaring me.

So I talk to my "ashamed" friends about it, tell them I'm on the brink of turning. Then they warn me about the all-consuming nature of MySpace, its dating hazards, its impersonality, and the fact that it's MySpace, for God's sake. This makes it all go away, and I let out a liberated sigh as I go about my business.

The bottom line is there are always going to be people who feel they're just too punk-rock for MySpace. Never mind the fact that a lot of MySpace profiles belong to... actual punk-rockers.

Colorado: Now With 20% Less Angst

It's been a couple weeks since the public smoking ban has been enforced in my state, and so far I haven't seen any overturned vehicles burning in the streets or bikers hurling molotovs at riot police.

But it could still happen, you know. At the billiard bar I go to, they've got a collection jar to "Fight the Smoking Ban". I don't know what that could fund at this point except an underground militia para la revolucion.

What has some Coloradans miffed more than the ban itself is that the state government didn't bother to ask us about it, first. Not that it matters though, since polls taken in bars and such showed over 70% support the smoking ban. Which means you've even got most of the smokers, themselves, saying, "yeah, I guess we're kind of obnoxious bastards, huh?"

The other protest is the idea that the government is telling us another thing we can't do to our own bodies in public places, and even some non-smokers join in this one.

I'm no libertarian, so I don't see how this right to self-endangerment is as strongly embraced by American law as people think it is. In Colorado, we ticket drivers and passengers for not wearing seltbelts, which is not only impossible to accurately enforce (just click it as you're pulled over, if you forget), it does not endanger anyone but the knuckleheads who don't bother. As little griping as I've heard about the smoking ban, I've heard next to nil about the ongoing seatbelt law. If freedom is the issue as opposed to an annoyingly forced change of personal habit, then this makes no sense to me.

A fella at a party shared with me his no-fail comeback against people who complain about the smoking ban: "Oh, yeah? It's just like if we were to disallow masturbation in restaurants. Even special sections masturbation. Would you be against banning that?"

Science may one day release field results supporting that such an activity will likewise contribute to cancer among those nearby, but I doubt it. I just kinda stared at the guy.

Anyway, the stronger argument against the ban is the economic one: establishments might lose too much business from their smelly regulars. But that hasn't been the case with the other installments of that law -- as long as they aren't near other businesses that are exempt from the ban, bars and restaurants are doing just dandy. I guess smokers in those states still leave their houses and go somewhere, which has apparently surprised a lot of people.

But that even Ireland has a ban on smoking in pubs... I don't know how you can get an Irishman to step outside a pub unless it's raining Jameson whiskey. Makes one wonder why we have any dissent on the issue here.

I initially wasn't excited about the ban, though, until I considered how nice it would be to leave a bowling alley or pool hall without my clothes smelling like angst. The states are going to keep jumping on this bandwagon, and I really like the trend. Sure, it's the state government telling other people what they can/can't do to their bodies, and that's just so sad but hot damn, I can finally wear some cologne to a bar now without it being a waste, so kiss my ass.

"No, there's no smoking allowed in bars, and soon no drinking and no talking!" -- Eddie Izzard