posted: April 5, 2002
I propose a new political system in which Hippopotami are in charge of the world. We can start with the United States.
Oh, yes, I know Hippos have notoriously bad tempers, but on the other hand, they have great family values and very few enemies. They can be quite charming and they know how to swim. They have thick hides, too; a necessity in politics.
Who would want to rile a Hippo? Politics would be so much more diplomatic if the politicians were afraid of being drowned by the Hippo-in-Chief. Of course, this would lead to massive toadyism, since most of the White House Staff, Cabinet, Congress, and the Senate would be busy kissing Hippo ass, but is this really any different from the current system? And, of course, there would be many Hippo translators put to work writing and even giving the speeches, since Hippos don't bother with lowly things like Human language. And what's new about this?
Of course, you couldn't keep Hippos in the White House, since not only are the doors too narrow, it's notoriously dry and full of icky furniture. Nope, the machinery of politics would have to move to the African savanah and camp out around rivers. Just line the rivers with dozens of Secret Service Agents. It will do those lads a world of good to get outdoors for a while, shed the suits and go swimming to protect the leaders of the world. Never mind the tsetse flies, poisonous fish, snakes and interesting diseases: those guys are supposed to be above petty worries like that. They should keep the sunglasses, though. It's very sunny out there in Africa.
And the press corps should go, too. They've been getting fat and flabby lately. Naturally it might be a bit more dangerous for them, since most of them have no training in survival or even cooking. And they are the most likely people to be the victims of Hippo-tantrums during press conferences. But, no great loss. American colleges, at least, are turning out more Journalism graduates than the world can reasonably absorb. Those who survive a season with the "Watery White House" will surely be promoted to positions of great reverence and independence within their profession.
Yes, I think Hippocracy would be a wonderful thing. People would be made much more aware of the balance of nature and the necessities of ecology and balance within a political world. Certainly politics would become rather less glamorous if the politicians found they had to make camp out in the middle of the African savanah and deal with the threat of hungry lions and stampeding wildebeests.
And the balance of power between nations would be quite different when the ones who already know how to travel light and live in a dangerous world are on an equal footing with those used to limos and Armani suits. Of course there will be some attrition from disease and disgust in the ranks of the Westerners, but, once again, what loss?
All together, I think this sounds wonderful. Not only would politics be rendered so much more interesting and slim (along with the political and press corps) it would finally make good TV. Yes, indeed!
So, I say, next election, vote Hippo! (The gods, know we've already got plenty of Hippocracy to make it pass....)
posted: April 12, 2002
"More coffee, please, Jill."
The waitress does a double take. "But I just filled that up, didn't I?"
He looks like a guilty child. "I drank it. So... can I have some more, please?"
"Sure. Wow, you're really going through it."
And it's going through him, judging by his frequent trips to the bathroom, at about a comparable rate.
It's the witches' brew of urban survival. The insidious beast of late-nighters' daymares.
Java. Joe. The Evil Black Brew....
One really should be leery of anything which, when passed through quickly, turns perfectly good water black. It's evil, I tell you, Evil! (Ebil, even, which is a whole shift to the side beyond mere evil.) It's the bean of Death! (Not to be confused with the Pigeon of Death, who, though a similar color, doesn't taste nearly as good and is distinctly less addictive.)
Coffee! It's the crack cocaine of foodstuffs.
Agghh! Must. Have. Coffee!
You see, I've figured it out: Coffee comes from Columbia; cocaine comes from Columbia. Both make you hyper. Both give you bad breath. Both taste kind of terrible the first time you try them, but then it grows on you. Once you get hooked on either, you're sure you could quit anytime, but you just don't want to.
So you see, by weight of evidence it's obvious that coffee is, in fact, just cocaine which has been colored and pressed into interesting shapes to lull us into thinking it is perfectly innocent stuff. Either that, or cocaine is actually coffee which has been bleached. Which would explain a lot. Like the popularity of Coca-Cola even after they supposedly took out the coke. See, they didn't take it out, they just relabelled it as a source of caffeine. What fiends!
Oh, it's sneaky addictive stuff! And the coffee-pushers of the world ease you into it at an early age. If you're in college, few but the most fanatical, wholesome, or outright Mormons can resist the siren call of the evil bean-brew. Smooth it out with lots of cream. Hype it up with even more sugar and guzzle it down to make it through the night of last-minute cramming for that utterly unintelligible final exam. Sure you can, kid.... Trust me. Would I steer you wrong?
And if you manage to survive college without becoming a serious-grade coffee fiend, there are still pitfalls awaiting you. The chocolate covered espresso bean. The coffee ice cream. Tiramisu. The Mocha.
Ah, yes, mocha. The doorway to coffee addiction for women. How can you possibly resist? Chocolate and speed! Oh, yeah! Just sip a little. It picks you right up. Of course it dumps you like a bad date later, but only if you stop the maintenance payments to the pusher... err... the barista. Ah, yes, coffee co-dependency is just around the corner. Get used to it, girl. After all, it's safer than men. (Not as much fun, though.)
And we only drink it because shooting up coffee would probably look too damned weird and get us arrested. In the world of coffee junkies, the tea-drinker would be King. Or something like that. And then coffee will become illegal, like all kinds of other stimulants and everyone who now sucks down their mud with gleeful grins will become instant criminals and do it in coffee speakeasys and back rooms. People will risk their lives for Pure Columbian and Kona, and gang wars will revolve around shipments of smuggled Kenyan Shade-Grown.
The Civilized World (or at least the upwardly mobile one) will be in an uproar. Politicians will declare a War on Coffee. Starbucks will become a swear word (not that it isn't for some people, already). Coffee clinics in uptown neighborhoods will be overrun with quaking execs and secretaries fighting for doses of pseudo-Caff like heroin addicts waiting on methadone. College students will start snorting powdered No-Doze and Vivarin.
Someone will inevitably invent the caffeine patch. Then uptight individuals will be urging us all to "use the patch" on TV, late at night. And nervous worker bees will be wearing them on their upper arms under their suit jackets and shivering with withdrawal while they sip illegally caffeinated water and assure each other that they are "clean and sleepy."
But not my husband, who will re-engineer the patch to spike the high instead of tapering it off, thus appearing to be Mr. Energetic when, in fact, he's Mr. Caffeinated. People will wonder how he does it and he will become rich selling illegal patches to coffee-addicts.
Mmm.... But in the meantime (or at least until we get stinking rich), pass the sugar and band-aids, please.
posted: April 19, 2002
Why can't some people keep their promises? Is there some kind of failure in basic honesty and reliability lately?
There's a very nice theater up the road from us. It was built on the site of an older theater which the owner had decided to renovate. During the process of prepping the building, they realized that doing what they wanted would actually be easier and cheaper if they tore down the original building and built new from the ground up. The owner has political connections and so the changes in plans, permits and licenses went through at an amazing rate of speed. The theater was built in about a year and opened with much fanfare.
Even before the theater opened, the owner swore it would be different from all other theaters in Seattle. Nicer, an icon of movie houses as movie houses used to be. It would reserve one screen for "classic" films and would offer the community special events and midnight shows of special films. When it opened, the Third Screen was showing Singing in the Rain. All of the shows sold out in advance. People loved the place.
It's a beautiful theater. I've been there frequently, but I go less frequently now, than I used to. Why? Because they started letting us down. They didn't keep their promises.
The Majestic Bay is the most expensive movie theater in Seattle. $8.75 for an evening show. Only the first show of the day is a matinee, although it used to be any show before 6pm. They have not shown a "classic" film in more than a year. They only show midnight films in the summer, now. There has never been a "special event" since the grand opening. Both the classic films and the midnight shows cost the same price as a regular evening film, but the quality of the prints they have shown has been terrible for every film except The Matrix (which was less than 10 years old). Every one was so scratched, patched and burned that they flickered, were dull and grey and had clicks, fuzzing and distortion in the sound tracks, where the sound didn't cut out completely. And yet, they still ask full price for these showings. Frankly, when the quality of the films is that poor, it's hardly surprising when the viewership drops.
And that is the excuse management gives for stopping their much ballyhooed programs: viewership went down. Well, folks, when you charge full, first-release film prices for films which are neither first-releases nor in reasonable condition, few of us are fool enough to keep on paying those prices. If you charge me the rate for an archive-quality print, I ought to get to see an archive quality print. I've seen better prints of your classic films on TV. And been able to hear all the dialog, too.
There's a concession stand on the second floor, but I've never seen it open. The seats in the theaters are comfortable and the aisles are wide enough to stretch your legs out in, but the access in the smaller screening rooms is terrible. There is no awning to stand under once you've bought your ticket, so you stand in the rain. The showtimes are displayed, not on the massive marquee overhead which is visible for blocks, but on the small single-sheet displays flat on the side of the building facing one of the streets of the 5-way intersection the theater sits at. The times can only be read while standing in front of the theater or directly across the street, if there are no cars in the road. And for some reason, the girl who sells the tickets is often rude and snotty, when she bothers to talk to you at all.
It's very disappointing. But it's not so strange, I suppose, when this is the same state which decided to give electricity to the state of California, last year, to assist with their power problems, but then raised prices to local customers by as much as 300%. They claimed this was an emergency measure, necessary when it turned out that the drought we were already deeply into when the agreement was made, forced the power company to run less water through the hydro-electric generating plants the state largely relies on. Why did we give power away when we knew we were going to come up short, then raise prices, locally? And why, when the "crisis" was over, did the prices stay so high? The emergency rates have never been rescinded and the power company had the gall to complain this year that they were getting the smallest price hike in the US. That might be because you gouged us last year, and then broke your promises to set prices back, don't ya think? It's unlikely that the power company really had no idea that there was going to be a water problem which would affect power when everyone was declaiming the low water levels and the lack of rain.
When I lived in California, there was a huge earthquake in San Francisco. I'm sure some of you remember that one; pancaked a certain freeway and tore a section out of a certain bridge. An additional, temporary sales tax was added to "assist" with earthquake recovery. A monetary goal was set and the tax was to be rescinded after two years. The goal was met, things were repaired for less than the state had expected, yet, when the two year limit rolled around, no one said a damned thing about rescinding the tax. It's still there.
Now, we have this interesting thing called The Office of Homeland Security which claims it's not going to be around forever and is only interested in "preventing domestic terrorism". Yet there is a kind of scary quality to this group which makes me think they are going to turn out to be just like a lot of other things which never go away. Just the name of the thing sounds like something out of 1984, or Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany. Already they are making noises about how we all need to be "better Americans" by not criticizing the government, lest we be labelled terrorists, by giving up our rights to free speech, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, self-protection, self-determination, freedom of religion... the list goes on. But it's a temporary measure, except it's not. After all, we've been told, it is sometimes necessary to give up some personal freedoms to remain free as a people, and free of fear and terror. Although this doesn't seem to extend to freedom from fear of our own government, and how free is that?
Me, I think they are likely to be just like the movie theater, the tax and the rate hike: promise one thing, give something else and never hold true to any promise.
I like the theater, better. At least I can choose not to go there.
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