The Brain-Dead Tattooed

I've often said--you remember--that people who don't believe in zombies have never taught in a public high school.  Neither have they ever lived in Florida.

Granted, my definition of "zombie" differs from that of, say, George Romero or the script writers of the TV hit "The Walking Dead.  Animated corpses, of course, do not exist.  However, there walk among us those with seemingly no brain activity whatsoever, who function solely on reflex.  The scariest part is, they can breed.

Herewith cases of actual zombies as reported in the "Tampa Bay Times".

* Charles Combs, 43, has an arrest record for bank robbery.  He also has a tattoo down his forearm that reads, "MOST WANTED".  While investigating another bank robbery, police stopped by a car wash to interview employees.  One had spotted Combs running by earlier and noticed his tattoo.  That information coupled with DNA evidence led to Combs' arrest.  Charlie got 30 years in the slam.

* 30-year-old Marquell Burge was shot to death last year behind the Ninth Street Pool Hall in St Petersburg.  Witnesses said the man who pulled the trigger had a "727 tattoo on the back of his neck and had just shot pool the other day."  Dwayne Bailey spoke to police officers because he heard he was a suspect.  Guess what Dwayne has tattooed on the back of his neck.  He has pleaded not guilty to murder and is awaiting trial.  727, incidentally is St Pete's area code.  Sigh.

* In another St Petersburg case, John Andrews was charged with three counts of sexual battery against three young women.  Two of the women described the same tattoo on their attacker:  "Ride or Die".  You figured it out, didn't you, Sherlock?  Yep.  John has "Ride or Die" permanently etched on his neck.  Apparently, John likes horses.  He is now awaiting trial.

* You have to wonder if Sean Eric Roberts didn't get up one morning, look in a mirror, and say, "No, I don't look nearly dumb enough.  What can I do to really screw myself up?"  He decided to ink an outline of the state of Florida on the side of his face.  Sean was accused in 2009 of breaking into a Riverview home.  How do you suppose he was identified?

* One woman was videotaped by store surveillance cameras using credit cards she had ripped off from parked vehicles.  The cameras recorded a cartoon character tattooed on her right shoulder.  Later, when she was arrested trying to break into a car, a tank top she wore revealed the tattoo.  When she was shown the surveillance videos, she admitted the tattoo was hers.  Not exactly in the right place for a tramp stamp, is it, Chelsea?

* Another woman suspected of snatching a purse and then using a stolen credit card at a nearby fast food restaurant was caught on surveillance video at the drive-thru.  She has a large tattoo on her right thigh and a smaller one on her left shoulder.  She spotted the surveillance camera and put down the sun visor to block it, but not before she looked into it.  Did you smile for your close-up, Miss Desmond?

But the hands-down best evidence that the brain-dead actually exist comes not from Florida, but from La-La Land.

Anthony Garcia was convicted of murdering a man outside a liquor store in California.  The case had gone unsolved until a Los Angeles County sheriff's sergeant was looking through photos and saw a diagram of the murder scene and how it went down tattooed on Garcia's chest.

St Petersburg police spokesman Mike Puetz said, "The more unique [the tattoo] is, with a unique location, the better."  It also helps that most people getting tattooed don't think to themselves, "Gee, I wonder if someone will be able to identify me from this?"

Certainly criminals and criminal wannabes aren't thinking.  Otherwise, they wouldn't be criminals.

Send in the Clowns

There are essentially two types of protest, violent and non-violent.

Examples of violent protest include the bombing of the on-campus Army Research Center at UW-Madison, which resulted in the death of a grad student; the burning of Watts, which resulted in making a poor area of LA even poorer; the trashing of the DNC in Chicago in 1968, which resulted in the take-over of the Democratic Party by liberals, and the throwing of bricks and rocks at men armed with M-16s at Kent State, which resulted in the deaths of four brick and rock throwers.

Examples of non-violent protest include the marches led by Martin Luther King, which resulted in the Civil Rights Act; the protests led by Mahatma Gandhi, which resulted in Indian independence; the confrontation of a lone Chinese man with a column of tanks, which resulted in world-wide attention and pressure on a communist dictatorship, and a love-in staged in bed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which resulted in world peace in our time.

Okay, clearly the result of that last example of non-violent protest is an exaggeration.

These protests had a focus, whether it was racism, the Vietnam War, the British Raj, oppression, or war in general.  And then you have the protests that were held at the 2012 RNC in Tampa.

One of the leaders of the RNC protesters was Andrew Speirs, 23, who had quit his job at a North Carolina deli to devote himself full time to protesting.  His cohort, Nathan Schwartz, 21, had asked his parents, who had already given him a Lexus, for an advance on his birthday money, which he used to buy such things as mouth guards in anticipation of police brutality.

Speirs, a self-styled anarchist, was expecting 300 fellow protesters.  72 showed up.  Protesters from Miami, New York, Dallas and other places, worried that they might get wet from Tropical Storm Isaac, said, "Nah, we're good," and cancelled out.

Speirs was chanting, "Whose streets?  Our streets!  Tear up the concrete!" when a more credible protester pointed out to him that his group was conducting a "voter suppression march with people who are not as radical as you."  Speirs' group let them pass.

While Speirs was doing his best to bait the police into creating You Tube moments, some protesters were posing for pictures with Tampa's police chief.  Others found themselfs in the embarrassing position of having to accept box lunches and cold bottled water from cops when their enablers failed to supply them with sustenance.

The one more or less success protesters had at disruption was at a power plant 15 miles south of the city.  At the plant, winter haven of warm water for manatees, two teams of three chained their arms together inside PVC pipes that were wrapped with chicken wire, tar, rebar and duct tape and laid down in the middle of the road.  When a power plant truck stopped rather than run over them a seventh climbed the truck and chained his neck to it.

The cops told them if they would leave nd get back on their buses, no one would be arrested.  The protesters, by this time bored and happy to oblige, were unable to free themselves and had to be cut apart.

Back in Tampa a group of 12, wearing pink cowboy hats, tried to arrest Condoleezza Rice for having been a part of the Bush Administration that sent troops to the Middle East.  As of this writing Condi remains at large.

15,000 protesters were expected.  500 or so showed up, of which only two were arrested.  Speirs and Schwartz said their issues were providing everyone with basic human rights, such as housing and food; eliminating corporate control of the political system and the right to protest in public spaces without a permit.

Hard to take folks who quit their jobs and drive luxury cars seriously when they demand housing and food.

I don't think anyone expected RNC protesters to self-immolate.  On the other hand, I would expect them to demonstrate a seriousness of purpose over serious issues.  This performance, all bombast and no substance, resulted in nothing but comic relief.

Gandhi, King and Lennon must be looking down and shaking their heads in disgust.

No Country for Superman

So, I'm immersed in my favorite activity, lying on my futon and complaining, when the phone rings.

"What?  What is it?"

"Whassup, pacfan?"

"Supe!  Is that you?  Where the hell are you?"

"Dude, I'm in my fortress.  I hadda get away.  Things were gettini kinda testy for the S-guy, know what I'm sayin'?  Plus, Lois took my wig!  Won't give it back, neither.  'Powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men' apparently don't apply to male pattern baldness."

"Yeah, I heard about the wig.  What'd you do to make her wanna do that?"

"She wanted me to go to the doctor and I wouldn't go.  She saw this ad on TV about how if you have an erection over four hours after taking Viagra, you need to see a doctor.  I told her, 'Look, bitch, in the first place, I don't take Viagra, and in the second place, four hours for me is minimal.  Man of steel--get the concept!'"

"So, what are you gonna do?"

"Well, first I thought I'd just punch the old moose in the mouth and take it.  Remember Ralph Kramden telling Alice, 'Pow!  To the moon!'?  I could really do it.  What would they do, put me in jail?  Good luck with that!  And besides, it's her own fault.  If she looked like Noel Neill, or Phyllis Coates, or Margo Kidder, or Teri Hatcher, or any other mousy-lookin' 'ho' we wouldn't be having this argument.  I'd get it done in four minutes, tops.  But, no, she's gotta look like Kate Bosworth!"

"Times are tough."

"Then she's all upset because I can fly and she can't.  'It ain't fair, it ain't fair!'  So I told her it's all in the cape, and she could borrow it if she wanted.  I even put it on her and took her up to the roof to see if she'd give it a try.  Thought she'd jump off, but she got suspicious, somehow.  Damn!"

"I know, man.  Can't live with 'em; can't shoot 'em."

"Tell me about it.  Then to make my life really suck, the feds are after me now about income taxes.  They said, 'You gotta have an income.  For instance, how do you pay your dry cleaning to keep that costume all bright and wrinkle-free?'  'I walk through a car wash and then fly through the sun a couple of times.'  "Well, there you are.  Where do you get the money for the car wash?'  Can't tell them I'm really that limp wad Clark Kent and make my money being a reporter.  Folks find that out, they'd be callin' me all the time, wantin' me to show up at their brat's birthday party, take care of some loser hittin' on their daughter, wantin' me to sponsor some product or another.  My calendar is full now, what with me fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way, and all.  'Sides, how'd that look, me selling, say, beer?  'Most interesting man in the world' my ass!  Let them get a look at me!  I do pick up some under-the-table bucks doing stunts for the movies, though, but I can't let that get out."

"Oh, yeah?  What movies?"

"The Superman movies, dummy!  Wasn't for me, they'd still be drawin' me flyin' like they did when Kirk Alyn was me.  You think that was Brandon Routh settin' that plane down on that ball field?  Or Christopher Reeve pushin' that missile into space?  Ha!  Bet he wished I was ridin' that horse for him the day he was thrown off and broke his neck."

"Aw, that's cold, Supe."

"What?  Too soon?"

I don't know.  I guess some folks wouldn't be happy even if they worked in a brewery.

Ayn Rand Redux

My reason for living and I recently returned from a visit up near the Arctic Circle, at a place called Manitowish Waters in Wisconsin.  Manitowish Waters consists of a chain of ten lakes, all connected so that one may boat among them unencumbered except by no-wake zones in the connecting channels.

Whenever I went out on a boat, and we passed other boaters, I would call out, "Have ye seen the white whale?"  The responses, save one, were liken unto deer caught in the headlights--staring eyes, gaping mouths, clueless countenances.  The one who responded verbally asked, "Who are you?  Moby Dick?"

After several such shout-outs, one of the people with me on the boat asked, "What is that Moby Dick crap?"  At first I suspected he thought I was referring to the male appendage of the little, skinny, bald-headed techno-pop artist who composed the credits-roll music at the end of all four Bourne movies, but after further consideration I doubt if he even made that connection.

His son knew what Moby Dick was.  He had read Melville's ponderous tome in high school, from which he was not far removed.

Moby-Dick or the Whale is not an easy read.  The plot narrative is interrupted here and there by entire chapters of woefully dated lectures on whaling.  Melville thought, for example, that the sperm whale is the largest animal on the planet.  He had heard rumors of the blue whale, but he was not convinced it exists.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is equally ponderous but for different reasons.  Rand belabors her points until her reader screams, "Enough!  I get it!"  Her attempt to draw readers into her hero, John Galt, becomes tedious.  "Who is John Galt?" her characters reply when asked any question to which there is no known answer.  You know, like, "Barbra Streisand?  What was James Brolin thinking?"  "Who is John Galt?"

After she killed her horse and then continued to beat it for much of the book, she has Galt make a chapter-long speech that more or less expounds on her philosophy of objectivism.  I skipped almost all of it.  You don't need to keep beating me over the head with anything.

Anyway, Atlas Shrugged envisions a time when society's creators and producers finally become fed up with a government that regulates them to the point they can no longer operate their businesses efficiently and profitably, and redistributes their inventions, innovations and wealth to society's moochers.  One by one they drop out and disappear, leaving the masses to learn the hard way the dangers and consequences of socialism.  Collapse therefore becomes inevitable and necessary to the rebirth of a purely capitalistic economy, nurtured by individuals and bereft of government interference.

Why the sudden resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand?  Because Mitt Romney chose as his running mate Paul Ryan, a--for want of a better word--disciple of Rand.  In an effort to understand Ryan and convey that understanding to their audiences, the talking heads and newspaper columnists are contrasting (Rand was a vehement atheist and pro-abortion; Ryan is neither) and comparing (Rand staunchly believed in minimal, unobtrusive government and individualism as opposed to collectivism; Ryan does also) the two.

While Moby-Dick may have been a staple on the reading list of most high school English teachers, it's almost a certainty Atlas Shrugged was not.  I didn't even come across it until years after I graduated college.  If you haven't read it I strongly recommend that you do so.  Its engaging storyline and intriguing premise will give you much to think about.

As for its effect on me, well, it pretty much preached to the choir.

Alternate Reality

Ever have that feeling that there's a parallel universe, where fantasy is reality, and once in a while something happens to convince you that you've crossed into it?  Where fanciful ideas emerge that are so bizarre, so contradictory to historical fact, that you are at a complete loss as to what you can contribute to dispel them?

For instance, one person I know is convinced that the moon landings were faked on Hollywood-like sets.  When someone is that delusional in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is just no way to argue the point.

Some will swear JFK wasn't really assassinated but sits in a wheelchair in a vegetative state at some clandestine 24/7 care facility.

Others deny the reality of Elvis' death and claim he is simply in seclusion somewhere away from fame's constant spotlight.  Their sole "evidence" of this deception is that his middle name is misspelled on his grave marker.

Even entire organizations will conspire to deny truth.  The VFW fostered the pretense that Muhammad Ali was not really boxing's heavyweight champion, was not really the best fighter in the world, when he refused to be inducted and led the charge to have him stripped of both title and livelihood.

And now the NCAA is claiming that Joe Paterno, Penn State's late former football coach, does not have the most wins in college football history, and that from 1998 through 2011 the Nittany Lions had no victories on the gridiron, only defeats.

Before you get your pantyhose in a knot, before your FOTLs wedge up your cheek cleavage, I assure you I'm not trying to defend either JoePa or Penn State in their handling of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.  I'm simply trying to make the case that one cannot replace well-documented fact with fiction in knee-jerk reaction to lynch mob torch-bearers.  Okay, Inspector Kemp?

In case you were napping during a Kardashian marathon and missed the story, the NCAA fined Penn State $60 mil (one year's gross football revenue), withdrew 10 scholarships, banned it from post-season play for four years, and placed it on probation for five.  No argument, here.

But the NCAA also stripped the football teams of 111 victories, a move so ludicrous on its face that I had to call NCAA for an explanation.

"Hi.  The pacfan, here.  I wish to query you on behalf of my tens of readers about a matter of great import.  Got a sec?"

"Pacfan, huh?  What is that, Pac-12?  Pacific Air Command?  Pacman?"

"Perhaps I'm speaking to the wrong person.  Is there anyone available with an IQ above your athletic cup size?"

"Oh, go ahead.  I need to talk to the hoi polloi on occasion.  It keeps me grounded."

"When you stripped Penn State of 111 wins, did you find evidence of the illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs?  Violations of recruiting rules?  Use of players who hadn't met academic requirements?"

"No."

"So those games were won fairly and squarely on the field of play."

"No, of course not.  They weren't won at all."

"But they were won.  We saw them on TV.  We read about them in the print media."

"But you couldn't have, because if you had, Penn State's record would have 111 more victories than it does.  It doesn't; ergo, it didn't win them."

"Perhaps I have the wrong number.  Is this the NCAA or the WWE?"

"The what?

Remember that season of Dallas that led up to Pam, or someone, killing Bobby, or someone (hell, I can't remember), and then the next season revealed that the whole previous season was all Pam's dream and Bobby was alive and well and taking a shower?

Is this deja vu, or what?

Movies Ain't History, Plutarch!

Just recently I watched Buffalo Girls, which purported to be a biography of Calamity Jane, with Angelica Huston in the title role.  Afterwards, as is my wont, I researched what history was available on the subject.  Here's the thing--when the facts about a person or subject are known, or are easy to look up, you can't credibly revise them to fit your script.  You got that, Oliver?

Calamity Jane indeed had the unrequited hots for Wild Bill Hickok.  The movie shows us that she bore Wild Bill a daughter, whom she gave up to an English couple who had just lost their own.  That would have been one hell of a gestation period.  Jane's real life daughter was born three years after Wild Bill was murdered while playing cards in Deadwood.

Speaking of Deadwood, remember the TV series?  You know, where Seth Bullock was diddling the widow of a murdered prospector until his wife, whom he married out of a sense of responsibility when her husband, his brother, was killed, showed up in town?  In reality, Bullock arrived in town with his wife, to whom he was happily married.  And in case you're interested, Al Swearengen was killed when, while down on his luck, he tried to hop a freight train.

Other movies pretending to be history abound.  Practically nothing, for example, is accurate about Lawrence of Arabia, except that it does glimpse WWI as it played out between the English-supported Arabs and the Turks.  T. E. Lawrence, not even five feet tall, looked nothing like six-foot-plus, blond hair, blue-eyed Peter O'Toole.  I suppose in Hollywood, where image is everything, heroes must look heroic, not like some swarthy, dwarfish everyman.  Auda abu Tuyi, whom Lawrence met in a tent, not while dancing around in Arabic garb, did resemble Anthony Quinn in looks, but was not the semi-literate lummox portrayed in the film.

The Bridge on the River Kwai, which looked nothing like the one in the movie, was blown up by allied bombers, not commandos.  The experiences of Dith Pran as depicted in The Killing Fields were part his and part those of the actor who portrayed him, Haing S. Ngor.

Practically all the movies about Wyatt Earp take liberties with reality.  My Daughter Clementine (Henry Fonda) borders on fantasy.  Gunfight at the OK Corral (Burt Lancaster) has Earp's brother, Jimmy, murdered instead of Morgan.  Tombstone (Kurt Russell) shows Earp visiting Doc Holliday in a Glenwood Springs sanatorium just before Holliday dies from TB.  In fact, Holliday and Earp rarely saw each other in Colorado, and Holliday died alone in a seedy hotel room.  Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) is the most historically accurate of all the Earp films.

Movies about the Vietnam War also earn mixed reviews.  Apocalypse Now isn't really a war movie, it just happens to be set in a war environment.  It does offer vignettes of the war--the USO show disintegrating into chaos, the napalming of a village--but the plot could just as easily have involved the hunting down of a rogue cop or spy who had crossed the line.

Platoon was Oliver Stone's anti-military paean.  The Green Berets was blatantly pro-military.  While diametrically opposite, both focused on the military and thus missed the whole point, that five presidents, convinced that a bunch of rice farmers was a threat to the most powerful nation on the planet, dragged the US into a land war in Asia that resulted in millions of wasted lives.

For my money, the best Vietnam War movie is Full Metal Jacket.  It is neither anti- nor pro-military.  It presents the inhumanity of war in very human terms--the false bravado of men secretly soiling their underwear, the outwardly blase reaction to death that masks the relief that it wasn't theirs, the black humor they used in an attempt to make light of the nightmare.

Movies are like pro-wrestling.  They are entertainment.  You want history?  Go to the library.  You want amusement?  Go to the movies.  You want real mayhem in the ring?  Watch mixed martial arts.

Okay, girl?

It's Democracy, Stupid!

One of the tenets of Dave's Tao is, "When considering a choice between one thing or another, consider also both or neither."

Last I heard, democracy is about choice.  One goes to the polls and chooses between one candidate or another.  Or, one may choose not to go to the polls at all.  It is a sad documentary on our citizenry that fewer than 60 per cent actually exercise their vote in presidential elections.  In local elections the figure is probably closer to 30 per cent.  Still, that's the nature of democracy.

Democracy : choice.  Get the concept.

Peter Orszag is vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup Inc and a former director of the OMB for the present administration.  One does not rise to a top-tier position with an international corporation without high-powered smarts.  A high-level position in the Obama Administration, well, not so much.  After all, look at Joe Biden.

Still, Orszag doesn't get it, this whole democracy thing.  In an op-ed piece published in the June 21 issue of the Tampa Bay Times, he argues for compulsory voting.

"The probability that any individual voter can alter the outcome of an election is effectively zero," he writes.  "So if voting imposes any cost, in terms of time or hassle, a perfectly rational person would conclude it's not worth doing.  The problem is that if each person were to reach such a rational conclusion no one would vote, and the system would collapse.  Mandatory voting solves that collective problem by requiring people to vote and punishing nonvoters with a fine."

Mandatory democracy?  How oxymoronic!  Moreover, does Orszag imply that democracy is irrational?

I'm not going to reproduce his whole thesis.  Google Peter Orszag and I'm sure it'll crop under one menu option or another.  More interesting to me is visualizing possible scenarios for enforcing such a requirement.

First thing we're going to need is a cabinet-level Department of Voter Enforcement, with an attending bureaucracy of regional, state and local offices.  Thousands of officers will have to be hired to roust those of voting age ffrom their residences and get them to the nearest polling place.  Courts will have to be established to adjudicate recalcitrant folks who just won't get with the program.

Next, we'll have to root these people out.  We'll have to bang on cardboard boxes in back alleys and under overpasses.  We'll have to raid NASCAR and WWE venues.  We'll either have to set up polling facilities in the nation's slams, or transport prisoners en masse to community polling locations.

A requirement of a poli sci course on political parties that I completed had me going to a number of houses to interview people whose names were provided me from a voter registration list.  I was to ask each a series of questions, one of which was for whom the voter was going to vote.

"Whichever one is the Democrat," was one answer.

"Why the Democrat?" I asked.

"'Cause my diddy and grandiddy were Democrats, so I am, too."

Another interviewee also responded Democrat, because that's what his boss was.

Mandatory voting will cost millions to administer and enforce, and for what?  So we can say that at last we have a president elected by a majority of citizens, not just a majority of voters?

Quantity < quality.  Get the concept.