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jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-04-19T06:49:43-07:00

The following is audio is taken from Hugh Hewitt's radio show on Thursday April 14. It is an interview about Barak Obama and other matters with Mark Steyn.

Warkentin Speaks

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-04-18T09:40:00-07:00

My nephew Mark Warkentin and I collaborated on trying to sell a college life series, so I know him as a writer. But there is an aspect of his life -- rough water swimming -- that I know hardly anything about because it is a grueling sport requiring such unrelenting practice and intense concentration as to be alien to my rather comfortable experience of The Sporting Life. Fortunately, Mark can express himself well, and I copied two of his emails from last year's Australian competition, Warkentin Down Under and Postscript: 2.500 Meters. Below, today's Wall Street Journal features a story on swimmers such as Mark who have passions for cold, wet and pain. ...During an open-water race early this year, a competitor elbowed American swimmer Micha Burden, fracturing her rib -- and underscoring the brutal potential of this little-known sport. Even by the standards of open-water swimming, however, the elbowing is likely to be unusually forceful next month in Seville, Spain. That's because something unprecedented is at stake for those who swim long distances in open water: a shot at Olympic gold. For the first time in more than a century, the Summer Games will feature a long-distance open-water swim, and the top 10 finishers in the men's and women's races in Seville will win berths in the Olympic contest this August in Beijing. ...The newest sport at the Olympics," Steven Munatones, a onetime open-water champion, declares on the Web site he recently created called 10Kswim.com. The 10-kilometer race will plug what many aquatic fans regard as the biggest gap in the Summer Games -- the absence of any swimming event longer than 20 minutes. The roughly two-hour swim -- nearly seven times longer than the previously longest swim, the 1,500-meter -- will give marathon swimmers the same chance for Olympic stardom that marathon runners have had since the 1896 advent of the modern Games. The 10K debut comes at a time of growing recreational passion for so-called open-water swimming. In part, this growth reflects the fast-rising popularity of the triathlon, an Olympic event since the Sydney Games of 2000. The triathlon's first leg consists of an open-water swim measuring 1.5 kilometers in the Olympics. Yet open-water swimming is also gaining fans because of its inherent difficulties. Many more people have reached the summit of Mount Everest than have swum across the English Channel. At a time of mounting interest in fitness and adventure, open water increasingly is recognized as the last frontier. Open water presents challenges rarely encountered in the pool: waves, often icy temperatures, the absence of direction-helping lane lines and collisions between swimmers. "It's common for someone to come out of the water with bruises or a black eye," says Paul Asmuth, a former world-champion American marathon swimmer and current coach of the U.S. team. ...Instead of a rough sea or a river with currents, it will take place in a lake-like rowing basin built especially for the Games. The race will involve four trips around a 2.5-kilometer course that will likely be free of waves and currents. But enhancing the difficulty of the swim will be fresh water -- salt water adds buoyancy -- and in any case the pursuit of open-water swimming's first Olympic medals is expected to unleash extraordinary aggression. "There's going to be a lot of body contact, and the flatter the water is, the more physical the race will be," says Mark Warkentin, winner of the U.S. 10K trials last October. Swimmers will lather grease on their ankles to keep competitors from pulling on them, he says. Indeed, open-water swimming features an element virtually unknown to pool swimming -- disqualifications for rough-housing.... But they can't always see what happens below the surface: The competitor who fractured Ms. Burden's rib received no infraction. To many stars of the pool, open-water swimming is the sport's Wild West. ...The field will consist largely of former pool swimmers, because little infrastructure exists for developing open-water specialists among children. ...Long-distance swimming dates back to ancient times -- long before the invention of the bicycle -- yet the Olympic 10K swim is making its debut decades later than did long-distance cycling. ...But early in the new century pools proliferated, and the world's premier swimmers essentially abandoned open water. As a sport, swimming became obsessed with scientific measurement -- strokes per lap, milliseconds per turn -- something that is hard to impose on open seas. Indeed, it is likely that no two swimmers of the English Channel have ever swum the exact same distance. ...staged a 20-some-mile race on the California coast, inducing 102 contestants to brave chilly waters and strong currents for prize money that totaled $40,000, according to Conrad Wennerberg's "Wind, Waves and Sunburn: A Brief History of Marathon Swimming." ...That same decade, Atlantic City, N.J., started the 22.5-mile Around the Island Marathon Swim. By the 1980s, open-water races were common enough that America's Mr. Asmuth could put his accounting business on hold for three months and travel around the world competing, his prize money more than sufficient to cover his expenses. Leaders of the sport created a federation to run races, raise prize money and designate world champions. But the case of Mr. Asmuth illustrates how obscure the sport remained, largely because it had no slot in the Olympics. One of the most accomplished American swimmers of the past half century, Mr. Asmuth won seven world championships, and 15 years after his retirement, one of his records still stands. ..."Had the Olympics had a 10K swim in the '80s, I would have been expected to win it," says Mr. Asmuth, who is now general manager of a California winery called Napa Valley Reserve. After years of lobbying, leaders of the sport persuaded FINA, the century-old regulator of international pool competitions, to embrace open-water swimming. Under FINA's guidance, the popularity of 5K, 10K and 25K championships skyrocketed, putting the sport within reach of its Holy Grail: the Olympics. After a decade of FINA lobbying, the IOC in 2005 agreed to add open-water swimming to the 2008 Games. Since its acceptance as an Olympic event, the sport has become enormously more competitive, gaining the interest of pool stars such as Australia's Grant Hackett. The world-record holder in the 1,500-meter swim, Mr. Hackett won the gold medal in that event in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, and hopes to defend that title in Beijing. But he also won his country's 10K trials and is regarded as a likely Olympic medal winner -- assuming he qualifies in Seville. Just as marathon foot races are less predictable than 100-meter sprints, distance swimming is hard to call. In any given race, a dozen or more swimmers are legitimate candidates to win, says Stephen "Sid" Cassidy, chairman of the open-water committee for FINA. ...But at the U.S. trials last October, staged to determine which two women would go to the qualifying race in Seville, Ms. Burden won the 10K race. Now, a top-10 finish in Spain will guarantee her a shot at Olympic gold. At age 26, she says, "This is the moment I've been waiting for."

Reverand Oprah

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-04-05T18:46:03-07:00

This shouldn't be too hard. Imagine a world in which God is in you no matter what you've done. There is no sin; your salvation comes only from within; all ways lead to harmony and therefore you don't have to apologize for your way. Then imagine someone who puts your beliefs into action. But it just so happens that his way is to despise you, to lust after your spouse, to poison your dog and to refuse to pay back a debt. Without an absolute God Who is just and Who is jealous of His justice, broaching no other ways but His way, you end up with a lot of demigods at each other's throats. An observable fact of life is that there are few Janusz Korczaks, Deitrich Bonhoeffers or Mother Theresas in our midst. Most of us have secret thoughts we don't want out in the open, and at some time or other we have done crappy things that we know were bad. That should be cause for a bit of humility. Unfortunately, the more money and power a person has, there's the temptation to believe those blessing indicate that everything is OK. You're not like the herd; your motives are more pure. Humility need not apply. People answer to you, not the other way around. Thus someone like Oraph Winfrey is not likely to square her life to any standard except her own pleasure, her own will. She's thinks she is doing a noble thing by proselytizing her doctrine to people who watch television, don't do much thinking and are consequently as gullible as children. Her ideas ultimately will make them either very unhappy or so self-righteous that they won't know how close they are to Hell.

Obama Unmasked

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-03-21T11:29:50-07:00

The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud By Charles Krauthammer WASHINGTON -- The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?... So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them? Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?" But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others? "I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma. Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred? (b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course. This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination. But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Sowell Gets It. As Usual.

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-03-13T09:57:21-07:00

'Non-Judgmental' Nonsense By Thomas Sowell March 12, 2008 What was he thinking of? That was the first question that came to mind when the story of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a prostitution ring was reported in the media. It was also the first question that came to mind when star quarterback Michael Vick ruined his career and lost his freedom over his involvement in illegal dog fighting. It is a question that arises when other very fortunate people risk everything for some trivial satisfaction. Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral hero. He was an unscrupulous prosecutor who threw his power around to ruin people, even when he didn't have any case with which to convict them of anything. Because he was using his overbearing power against businesses, the anti-business left idolized him, just as they idolized Ralph Nader before him as some sort of secular saint because he attacked General Motors. What Eliot Spitzer did was not out of character. It was completely in character for someone with the hubris that comes with the ability to misuse his power to make or break innocent people. After John Whitehead, former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Attorney General Spitzer's handling of a case involving Maurice Greenberg, Spitzer was quoted by Whitehead as saying: "I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done." When you start thinking of yourself as a little tin god, able to throw your weight around to bully people into silence, it is a sign of a sense of being exempt from the laws and social rules that apply to other people. For someone with this kind of hubris to risk his whole political career for a fling with a prostitute is no more surprising than for Michael Vick to throw away millions to indulge his taste for dog fighting or for Leona Helmsley to avoid paying taxes -- not because she couldn't easily afford to pay taxes and still have more money left than she could ever spend -- but because she felt above the rules that apply to "the little people." What is almost as scary as having someone like Eliot Spitzer holding power is having so many pundits talking as if this is just a "personal" flaw in Governor Spitzer that should not disqualify him for public office. Spitzer himself spoke of his "personal" failing as if it had nothing to do with his being governor of New York. In this age, when it is considered the height of sophistication to be "non-judgmental," one of the corollaries is that "personal" failings have no relevance to the performance of official duties. What that amounts to, ultimately, is that character doesn't matter. In reality, character matters enormously, more so than most things that can be seen, measured or documented.Character is what we have to depend on when we entrust power over ourselves, our children and our society to government officials. We cannot risk all that for the sake of the fashionable affectation of being more non-judgmental than thou. Currently, various facts are belatedly beginning to leak out that give us clues to the character of Barack Obama. But to report these facts is being characterized as a "personal" attack. Barack Obama's personal and financial association with a man under criminal indictment in Illinois is not just a "personal" matter. Nor is his 20 years of going to a church whose pastor has praised Louis Farrakhan and condemned the United States in both sweeping terms and with obscene language. The Obama camp likens mentioning such things to criticizing him because of what members of his family might have said or done. But it was said, long ago, that you can pick your friends but not your relatives. Obama chose to be part of that church for 20 years. He was not born into it. His "personal" character matters, just as Eliot Spitzer's "personal" character matters -- and just as Hillary Clinton's character would matter if she had any. --------- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

Berkeley Baboons

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-02-09T08:30:29-08:00

You are watching the adult end products of schools that teach very little but leftist dogma and a narcissistic brand of political correctness. I've had a particular animus against Berkeley, California, since I wrote Dispatches From The Homefront, in 2001. Moslems had attacked us, but we hadn't yet fought back. Still, a self-righteous city council refused to allow fire trucks to fly the American Flag and show solidarity with New York City's 9/11 firefighters. At the time I said I was going to boycott doing any business with the city. Now I think it is time to do quite a bit more. When citizens hate the country so much that they effectively give aid and comfort to our enemies, why contribute to their ease and safety with Federal tax dollars? No subsidies for fire, police, sanitation or schools. Especially schools. Given the evidence of their parents, Berkeley is a place where every child needs to be left behind. A more moderate form of protest may be found at MoveAmericaForward.org. Scroll down and sign the petition.

Thanksgiving News

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-11-19T08:23:00-08:00

It's been more than a month since my last posting, but I'm not dead. I've been hard at work on a project, about which I wish strangers were as quick as "Colonel Taggart" has been in responding to requests for permission to use some of their material. C'm'on, Dusty, speak to me! In the meantime I want to talk briefly about Christmas. Last year I touted a book for gift-giving, A Monk's Alphabet, by Jeremy Driscoll, a Benedictine monk. He's a smart guy, funny too and a wonderful writer. He gave me permission to reproduce a story from his book. (The above link will take you to my review that includes that story, "First Love.") The latest is that A Monk's Alphabet is coming out in paperback on December 1st...or the 11th depending on where you look it up. Either way, it's in time for gift-giving, not mention cheaper than what you had to pay in 2006. Although Father Jeremy is a religious man, his book is not abut religion in a preachy sense; more specifically, he's not trying to convert you to Christianity any more than Graham Green, Flannery O'Connor or Evelyn Waugh tried. Fr. Jeremy is very different from those writers, but he belongs on the list. That's why his book is good for giving to friends and family on other occasions. The anniversary of Pearl Harbor, for example. Around the fifth day of Hanukkah when you've run out of ideas. As a way to keep thoughts from straying to the obscene and the irreligious during Ramadan. Kwanzaa. My birthday on March 19th. The possibilities are endless. In other news Vitorio Sanzone (known to me and the other 200 close personal friends on his email list as Vito or Veet) writes, "...the military ordered 1,000 copies of The Courage To Be Brilliant." Said book was published by Vito's company Vitorio Media Inc. and was authored by Martha Monahan with me tagging along. Veet, which military? Give me a call. Another note. Yes, Mrs. R., you are absolutely right, you have hit the nail on the head, gone to the heart of the matter and gotten the crux of it as it were. The way to make money on the internet is to have Google and other sponsors place advertising on your site. There's a good movie coming out, Liberty. It has been more than a year in the making, on weekends and such, with a shoestring budget, prayers and sweat equity that is priceless. Psst, Chris. Clarence. Google would have had to pay for that. Know what I'm saying? A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

Knee Deep

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-29T22:14:24-07:00

Mel Tari says he walked on water, but the fact is, he was only knee deep in a miracle. Some skeptics would say that negates the whole thing, but I'm one who wishes I had the same fire in my belly. Have a great Sunday.

Yo, Gargoyle

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-07T14:39:47-07:00

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, Red Earth White Earth and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln tip an iceberg of prestigious credits. ...In ancient times gargoyles, sometime called chimera, served as drainage spouts for Egyptian and Greek temples built by pagans who apparently had never seen a rain gutter. ...Originating in idol worship was not good for their reputation, but the 7th Century Bishop of Rouen, later canonized as St. Romaine, reputedly believed that there is some good in every one of God’s creatures, including a forest dragon that terrorized folks who wandered too far beyond the city walls. Beguiled by the Bishop’s tenderness, the dragon turned to helping the citizens of Rouen, and in honor of him they carved the dragon’s likeness to adorn the cathedral and let water off the roof. ...The one I like has the Bishop hooking up with a condemned prisoner to subdue the monster. It was called Gargouille, a derivative of the French word for gullet and progenitor of our modern word gargoyle. Gargouille thrashed around in the Sien, was part human, part demon, and had a tendency to spew water all over the countryside, causing vast flooding. ...Tonto always come back to camp, sometimes blooded, once with rope burns around his neck, but with vital signs almost as good as Kimosabe’s and full useful intel. So, as the felon showed himself to be as quick on the get away as Tonto would have to be, the Bishop formed his fingers in the sign of the Cross.... Or like Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness and again in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. ...It’s clear that a crucifix couldn’t kill Dracula, but in the Bishop’s day there was no profit to be made from a sequel.... Gargouille then inspired likenesses that were sweat hog ugly, carved in stone and stuck on the roofs of medieval cathedrals to show evil spirits what fate would befall them if they wandered too close. In modern times sleeker gargoyles in stainless steel were placed atop the Chrysler Building in New York City to ward off Ford motorcars. Take the gargoyles of yesteryear, mix New Age thinking into their post-modern stories, and they become misunderstood, sort of like King Kong, or downright heroic, like Mighty Joe Young. Disney produced a kids’ animation series followed by a knock-off, direct-to-video movie in the mid-Nineties that made gargoyles superheroes lazing about an ancient Scottish castle.... Feeling needed again, the gargoyles ward of “modern threats to humanity”— judges who let murderers walk free, black pimps who beat up their ho’s, greasy white tweakers, a couple of U.S. Senators. ...Don’t you wish Disney could imagine some real and present evil, like media companies that flirt with the occult and then sell it to the kiddies? The gargoyles Bob and Rick introduced to television a quarter of century earlier just wanted to be left alone. But when they were disturbed, it was like stepping on green mambas.... The monsters lived in the desert, so there wasn’t much water spewing; but they were bad ass when that used to mean something. ...As they pack it up for further investigation, they unwittingly disturbed the gargoyle equivalent of an Indian burial ground, and if you ever saw Jeremiah Johnson, you know what that means. They are driving back to a university when monsters dive down off the hot rocks and give them a bad time, denting their car and such, and clearly wanting to tear the occupants limb from limb before they retrieve the ancestral bones. ...A long day at Wolper, a couple of scotches, a pretty good warmed over dinner and I was ready for bed, or more correctly, the snoring nap you take before the wife yells, “Turn off the TV and come to bed!” ...I just never associated it with the Bob and Rick I met two years later and worked with off and on for the next fifteen. ...Further, although entertainment professionals incorporate socialization in their dealings, and that may include chitchat about past projects or past lives, the work at hand always hangs over them like a Sword of Damocles. Whether there is a lull, a meal or a party, the talk always comes back to the present work.... When I am socializing, I’d rather fill my mouth with food and drink than my head with the details of other people’s lives. ...When I’m in a Greyhound Bus Depot and people find out I’m a famous Hollywood writer, I’m swamped with stories of murder, extramarital affairs, Jesus saved me from drugs, let me show you something in the alley, and you should write the screenplay ...Neither Bob nor Rick struck me as the kind who cared whether you could get half off on a can of Spaghetti-Os, but you never know when eccentricity will come screaming forth, so its best to keep one’s guard up. ...Bob came out of the Marine Corps, and then, I don’t know, he sold space ads for The Hollywood Reporter or Variety. ...By 1969 Rick was an associate producer on The Reivers, a film that put Steve McQueen in an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel. McQueen introduced Rick to Bob, or it could have been the other way around. Regardless, secretaries and development assistants over the years led me to believe that Chris-Rose Productions was the result of Steve McQueen suggesting the two should get together and put on their own shows. Whether that’s true or not, it brings us back to the early piece called Gargoyles. I was at a party at Bob’s house a dozen years after its making. There was either another writer or a director present who knew one of the best inside stories I have ever heard. ...At the time of Gargoyles making in 1972 the slogan “Black Is Beautiful” had become “Black Power” with a clenched fist. California appellate courts overturned murder and assault convictions against the Maoist leadership of the Black Panther Party, freeing the leaders to fight off kidnapping, embezzlement and more murder charges. For reasons that are an enigma to me, intellectual and media elites began to accept the Panthers in the romantic revolutionary light in which radical leftists bathed them. Co-founder of the Party Huey Newton was in prison for killing a prostitute and addicted to drugs when the University of California, Santa Cruz, awarded him a doctorate. Eldridge Cleaver, the self-confessed rapist of white women who said he practiced on ghetto girls, was lionized for jumping bail and fleeing to Algeria. Angela Davis, a middle class woman turned Communist, feminist, university darling, Panther and owner of the shotgun used to blow off the face of a judge, inspired a worshipful song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. ...Maluena Karenga’s whole cloth invention of Kwanza as a uniquely black holiday, with pseudo roots in African animism, gained wider, unquestioning acceptance. ...A person who needed his consciousness raised was a racist, patriarchal, probably a Republican or a Christian fundamentalist, a person in some way spiritually and mentally deformed.... Therefore they already knew that The Man was the problem and did not need their consciousnesses raised.... Hence when faced with a radical spewing hate or just a misguided fool spouting nonsense, most blacks and whites kept their opinions to themselves. ...He and Rick had a movie to get and only twenty-one days to do it. On the second or third day of shooting the lead gargoyle stepped out of a scene and took Bob aside. “Some of the bros are saying that my dialogue makes me sound like an Uncle Tom.”

Funny Girl Meets Her Equal

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-04T11:44:50-07:00

But even as I praise her, my guess is she would not be thrilled if I used her real name. ...The reason is that people have a tendency to mistake my tastes as an insult when I refer to anything seemingly outside the bounds of those preferences. I know “Back In The Saddle Again” by heart, believe that Elvis could beat the Three Tenors all to heck, and think the best film music ever is a toss up between “Men of Harlech” from Zulu and Frankie Lane singing the theme from Gunfight At The O.K.... As far as hymnity is concerned, if a church spent a whole year repeating “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” for the processional, offering and recessional, I’d be warming a pew more frequently than at Easter, and I’d put a damn sight more than a dollar in the collection plate too. That I can prefer all the above yet find this singer extremely talented is true musical appreciation, a rare and wonderful thing, but as with so many treasures in this fallen world, expansiveness of taste is often overlooked or totally misunderstood. Suppose for a moment that I am a student of human anatomy, and that my double-wide is packed with works by Doctors Galen and Gray, paintings by Rubens, L’trec and Vargas, every DVD Kyla Cole ever appeared in, plus a collection of almost new Hustler magazines published before Larry Flynn was confined to a wheelchair. Then suppose I am heard shouting something nice about the neighbor lady, the sweetness of her nature, the kindness of her spirit, that sort of thing. ...So here I am with Kip Attaway playing in the background, trying to keep everyone off my tail by calling this real life songstress.... ...When Linda L’stesso and I were freeway close in L.A.’s biological sink, a songwriter and mutual acquaintance kept telling me how funny Linda was, and vice verse, each of us being assured how much chuckling, thigh-slapping amusement would come from meeting the other. ...As far as I’m concerned, that’s good in a gospel artist, so as I got to know more about her, I have to admit to some disappointment. ...This sad event took my current wife out of the country, depleted our bank account and forced an abrupt cut in telephone service just hours before an expected phone call from a producer. ...What was my number again so that he could get back to me at some other time? ...Every drug dealer in Los Angeles had a cell phone, so they were catching on fast with the Hollywood crowd. ...I peddled to the nearest gas station, filled the tires and used the ARCO courtesy phone just outside the executive dinning room of AM-PM Entertainment. ...By now I was down to my last dollar, hungry from all the cycling and pretty well convinced that the producer and I would never connect. ...Food was on the agenda because people whose last names started with A through E were supposed to bring drinks. Usually such affairs—save the whales for Christ, feed the hungry for Christ, teach ghetto children to put some art into their graffiti for Christ—are very much like the secular counterparts from which they copy their concerns.... Therefore you hear a lot of “Jesus Christ”s, first name or last name, but never thrown together as in the secular world to introduce a strong, negative opinion or as an exclamation of surprise, like when you accidentally wander into a ladies restroom whistling “In The Navy.” Either way, these occasions are attended by a few of the rich and famous, the odd true believer and a whole mass of folks looking to network their way to a higher place on the socio-economic dung heap. ...There was a story, reputedly about someone the likes of Norman Lear or perhaps the great one himself, the television producer and social activist who founded People for the American Way. He was supposed to have jumped whole hog into environmentalism, but most greens in the Hollywood branch of the movement were a scruffy, unemployed lot. Hence he proposed an executive committee of his peers that would control the whole group but not have meet with them. ...That makes you a special brother or sister, often called “Prayer Partner,” and puts you on the invite list for an intimate dinner of 100-plus with the pastor, during which he asks you to prayerfully consider giving more money so that you can become a member of Sea Org, the super tight inner inner ring. ...Groups that are just staring out can’t afford the snobbery, which is doubtlessly why I got my invitation to the Malibu shindig. ...Like, I am going to open my Rolodex and give you the names of people I’ve been cultivating so that you can bamboozled them with your superficial charm and flash-in-the-pan talent, making my ass creeping yesterday’s news. ...I never had time to cherry out the Caddy, but as our good Lord would have it, I ran out of gas near a family of farm workers needing shelter.... Friends who weren’t really friends joked that the Century is always driven by an old woman you can barely see except for the blue tint of her hair.... But it is equally true that, if your daytime soaps are interrupted by local coverage of a car chase and the guys with no shirts have been lucky enough to mug an old lady in a Century, you will not see cops stopping them on the 405, the 5 or the 14.... No, that Century is going to take two bullets through the engine block in Inglewood, shred its tires on spike strips west of Lancaster, blow the radiator at Apple Valley and only stop when it runs out of gas east of Barstow.... B was a muscle car, and even with only two-and-half gallons of hoochy mama in her tank, she could take me to Hell and back. With a dollar to my name, bringing drinks to Malibu would be a cinch because, praise God, most show biz folks either are strung out on drugs and alcohol or have turned their lives over to the Higher Power of a 12 Step program. If I paid for the 99-cent special for a litter of Ralph’s house brand orange soda—“Get the second one free”— I could bring relief to the reformed drunks who would show up. ...Some people think that Christians don’t drink, or if they do, it’s only in the closet.... Tee totaling cultists like Southern Baptists are no about everything whereas Presbyterians, Methodists and Lutherans let it ride as a matter of personal conscience, which I've always found easy to tame. Unless it’s a very small private gathering, you won’t find Ketle One or Glenlivet, but I have seen a lot of Christians on their knees with wine, and that’s what I was willing to settle for in Malibu. ...The last time I had a view like that was on the beach with Larry Hagman and a former C.I.A. ...As I plunked my orange sodas on a bare buffet table that was about half the size of a tennis court, I gave her a wink and smile, and said: ...My being a cheapskate would be understood in a Third World Way, as merely the cards I had been dealt by El Señor in the great Lotería of life, and by the way, should remain our little secret. ...Sometime later an Hispanic friend pointed out that heuvos can be a colloquialism for testicles, and the way I pronounced his native tongue could make the unwary think I have the balls of a chicken. ...There were a few guests milling in the palatial living room, and the event’s host and hostess hadn’t yet appeared on the massive marble staircase. ...I began to mix to keep my mind off my hunger, find out what all the idealism was about, show some empathy for seal pups for Christ or whatever. As more and more people arrived, it was clear there was general vagueness about what precisely we were doing together. ...The organizers were about to ask for volunteers to pound nails in Honduras, work a soup kitchen downtown, pass out tracks on Santa Monica Pier, the possibilities were endlessly horrifying. Any networking to my advantage would be for a lackey position at Trinity Broadcast Network, what I secretly called “The Crying Channel.” The only thing to do was to eat and run, so I weaved and dodged my way back to the dinning room, muttering, “Praise the Lord, excuse me, bless you, gimme back my resume.” ...The majority of their sodas and sparkling waters needed but one thing to make them palatable, which was no where to be seen, and after Jim Jones who in his right mind would touch a punch bowl of Kool-Aid? I wasn’t in my right mind, and the Kool-Aid wasn’t spiked with anything except the block of ice watering it down. ...What was clear was that they were at least working professionals because none of them had time to bring anything except bags of stale cookies from the convenience store down the road. ...By the time I got to Phoenix from the Chicago Fire of my life, she and the Mister had moved to a ranch two thousand miles away.... I still see Linda huddling with another woman, their glancing prettily in my direction and starting a wave of tinkling laughter that rippled around the room.

The Icebergs Are Coming, The Icebergs Are Coming!

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-08-14T09:23:21-07:00

Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble Aug 14, 2007 04:30 Am DANIEL DALE STAFF REPORTER In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math. After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review. Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998. More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius. NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are "not necessarily material to climate policy." But the revisions have been seized on by conservative Americans, including firebrand radio host Rush Limbaugh, as evidence that climate change science is unsound. Said Limbaugh last Thursday: "What do we have here? We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA ... is in the scientific community with false data." However Stephen McIntyre, who set off the uproar, described his finding as a "a micro-change. But it was kind of fun." A former mining executive who runs the blog ClimateAudit.org, McIntyre, 59, earned attention in 2003 when he put out data challenging the so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting a spike in global temperatures. This time, he sifted NASA's use of temperature anomalies, which measure how much warmer or colder a place is at a given time compared with its 30-year average. Puzzled by a bizarre "jump" in the U.S. anomalies from 1999 to 2000, McIntyre discovered the data after 1999 wasn't being fractionally adjusted to allow for the times of day that readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations. McIntyre emailed his finding to NASA's Goddard Institute, triggering the data review. "They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces.

Krumline To The Rescue

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-08-10T09:06:22-07:00

I didn’t recognize the sender’s name, didn’t see mine in the Send To list, and had no idea who the email’s other recipients were, so presumed my copy was like crossed wires. You know, when you pick up the phone and before you can dial, you hear two strangers plotting a murder, but you can’t get either one to, “Hang up! I’m trying to order pizza!” ...stoked my curiosity to read more, and usually I’m a sucker for a woman, which was what writer was if the sign off, “Wish I had stayed with acting, xoxo, Jasmine,” meant anything. Apparently she was a financial analyst who had an important decision to make for some Daddy Warbucks, and was asking friends, presumably in the money game too, if they would reply to four questions. ...Should I go short or long on Countrywide Mortgage? ...When do you think the Fed will decrease interest rates? ...Is this distressed market a giant opportunity, or am I delusional? ...Any opinion on small caps? As I brooded on how unfairly I’d been graded in economics and other college classes, causing my dad to cut off tuition and me to go to work to pay off gambling debts, one thing led to another, and after a cocktail or two, I fired off a reply. ...I have a unified set theory of the universe that might be helpful to you. I call it “The Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge” after W.S. Krumline, Head Hasher 7AM shift, Troy Hall, University of Southern California, 1967. First, recall all the courses you took in college, and don't worry that most were probably unrelated to each other and had nothing to do with your present career. Second, think of them as pancakes, some doughy, some overcooked, all plopped willy-nilly onto a cold plate by an individual who resents the fact that you are going through the food line of life while he's stuck behind the counter working for minimum wage. Third, drop the plate on the sticky linoleum floor of your imagination. Step back because it won't be neat. Some pancakes will be touching; others will not. Regardless, go to the fourth step, in which you imagine a large turkey baster that you ram through as many pancakes as you can.... Whatever is sucked up into the baster is the wondrously interrelated core knowledge of everything you learned. That core can be then applied to anything...well, almost anything...that goes on in your life. You might think that a bit of anthro, econ and chem have nothing to do with each other, but suddenly you're up for some R & R in Bangcock, and it's a big Greek Eureka moment when your loose change comes together with a girl named Suzy and some Tai Stick. Or Boyle's Law, you say, what's that got to do with Ricardo's Theory of Rent, much less Spanish? Well, if you have ever been freezing cold in a bed-sitter in Earl's Court, the Pakistani landlord is going to explain exactly what that has to do with London power authority, and you’ll undoubtedly find yourself saying, “Hey, Cisco, how about trying that again in español?” ...I can't tell you how many times I have used the Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge to bring grace and order to my life. Your email asking for investment predictions had the turkey baster in my mind gushing forth like Krakatoa on Pompeii, namely— Should you be long or short on Countrywide? Everybody needs a roof over his head, right? But defaults are at record high, right? Well, two rights don’t make a wrong. I don’t know what that tells you about buying a particular stock, but Krumline told me that his theory can’t cover everything, depending as it does on a single vector unique to etc., etc. Look, I was asleep a lot. Why can't you settle for a little mystery in your life? When will the Fed decrease rates? When Alan Greenspan wants to. Or is he retired? I know he’s married to Andrea...... It’s Ben Somebody.... Just picture the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank putting pantyhose on one leg at a time, making him as human as you or I, and that’s how I can offer the second part of my answer.... If nothing else, it’s a great conductor of electricity. Is the distressed market a giant opportunity or are you delusional? Well, that's easy. Finally, I know this for sure: small caps don't grab the eye like BIG CAPS. Check it out with The Wall Street Journal. And watch for Mr.Murdoch putting in a Page 3 Investment Vixen feature. There’s going to be nothing small about her assets, believe you me. ...I got a reply just this morning. Miss Jasmine thinks my serendipitous response was as sound as any from her experts, and wants to know where I hang my hat on Wall Street. Maybe we can have lunch. Far be it from me to burst a lady’s or the market’s bubble, so I won’t explain that I’m “between pictures” as we say here in sunny southern California, and usually don’t offer financial advice unless I’m swearing at my creditors. But it does feel good, knowing I can change careers any time I feel like it, and the sun will still go weaving round the earth just like Gallo said it would.

New Look, Important Reading and Free Stuff

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-07-31T12:01:31-07:00

This weekend my friend Todd Albertson dropped by on his way from Australia to Tailand, a rather circuitous route if you ask me. We spent a day redesigning my web site, getting me hooked into LinkedIn.com and linking the Allies Section of this site to victorycauscus.com. The Victory Caucus is a group of knowledgeable observers and military professionals who don't like war but understand that pulling out of Iraq would mean genocide there, a possible attack against Israel and an undoubted increase of terrorism in the West. That's the West, not just the hated U.S. The chorus masters of Old Media would like to give the field to Democrats and wobbly Republicans who are, perhaps unwittingly, in favor of defeat. The Victory Caucus is corrective reading for anyone who doesn't have his head too firmly wedged up his nether throat. On a lighter note Todd and I spent a great amount of time pirating our own video, The Proverb, so that it may be seen in all of its ten-minute, ultra low budget, epic entirity. It can still be bought or rented, but only on jeffandrus.com do you get the freebe. Why? Because I love each and every one of you. But then you have to read a little bit before you actually get to the video because I am, for all my good qualities, somewhat vain.

An Unknown Soldier

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-06-18T13:03:47-07:00

I met them over a long Saturday barbecue, parents quietly proud of their boy. It took nearly the whole evening for it to come out. Their son had wanted to be a soldier since he was five years old. He enlisted after college and is now with Special Forces in Iraq. His father is politically conservative, and their son loves arguing opposing views with him. “Just to bait him,” the mother says. Does she worry about him? “Yes, I can’t help it. But God keeps showing me that I have to give my worries to Him.” Phone calls from the young man are bounced around the globe so that they appear to come from anywhere but Iraq. Web mail is very slow because it is censored. But they have a code worked out. The family home is Baghdad; the two-lane highway nearby, the Tigris; and, “I wish I could look toward the hills and see the ironwood in bloom,” denotes east or west, with other hints for north and south. Thus the parents generally know where their son is tasked with an Iraqi unit that once served the Saddam regime and is now involved in counter-terrorism. He wrote once to his parents, “Most of these men have probably committed atrocities. But they are brave soldiers and very skilled. I do not question their loyalty. I put my life in their hands everyday.” More recently he described the loss of a buddy who was killed in Afghanistan. “I wanted to get away, just be by myself. But after a while my men were all around me. One of them said, ‘We don’t know why you Americans fight for our freedom. But your grief is ours. We are with you.” The Iraqis sat quietly with their comrade and mourned for the loss of a young American they did not know, who was killed in a land they had not seen.

Identity Used To Matter

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-06-09T16:33:24-07:00

This is a clip from the 1964 movie Zulu starring Stanley Baker and co-starring Michel Caine in his first film role. It commemorates the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879 when 140 Welch engineers and other British soldiers held off an attacking force of 4,000 Zulu impi that had just wiped out a British column of 1,000 men and handed Great Britian its worse defeat by native forces ever. The proud but exhausted Zulu knew who they were. And so did the defenders of the tiny mission station at Rorke's Drift. They won the battle and received more Victoria Crosses than have been awarded in any single action since. Today our enemies know who they are. We have forgotten.

The Gods Of Business

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-05-19T10:27:45-07:00

At first glance The Gods of Business: The Intersection of Faith and the Marketplace is a plain spoken overview of major religions and how the world’s faithful engage in commercial intercourse. But author Todd Albertson is a hardheaded doctor of theology and the former owner of a multi-million-dollar transportation company that was roughly treated by People Who Believe In All That Is Holy. He intends his book to be a secular Michelin Guide for how the global businessman can get screwed nine different ways by folks who all claim a version of the Golden Rule. He gallops through the histories of diverse religions, offers excerpts from sacred texts and provocatively suggests the ways in which core beliefs are used to excuse greed and corruption regardless of creed, color or national origin. If Albertson has a bias, it comes out in his arguments for regarding Secular Post Modernism as a religion. The zeal of its adherents matches that of Mohamed’s for child brides, the Hindus’ for adding little girl’s to the funeral pyres of husbands and the Christian televangelist’s for bilking the quick and the dead out of "seed money "to continue the ministry from another earthly mansion. What’s bad is made worse by the Secular Postmodernist’s unabashed narcissism and absolute refusal to embrace any notion of absolutes. Golden Rule be damned. Do unto others as it suits you. This summer Trinity Alumni Press is releasing The Gods of Business for sale through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the usual outlets. The list price is twenty bucks. I got my copy for free because I edited it. Todd is a friend. He paid me. But not enough to like the book or say nice things about it. There are a number of authors whose books have appeared in the top ten of The New York Times bestseller list, and for about $500 to $1,000 they will write a good review for whatever you give them to read. I’m not among that august company of whores, and having been bought for the equivalent of two bits and done my duty, I can say in my free time whatever I want. I do like The Gods of Business. I think it is a must read for anyone who wants to know why Jesus wept but still intends to do business with the bastards.

An Inconvenient Truth

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-04-13T20:33:15-07:00

April 16, 2007 issue - Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true.... Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week. A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing. In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface. Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions. Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy. Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don't explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn't account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record—an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries. Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable. Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate. ...Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

Postscript: 2,500 Meters

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-03-28T22:54:21-07:00

the most emotional swim of my life. 4th place. I led for almost 20,000meters but couldn't hang on in the last 5,000. Wind speed 25 knots, water temp 64. thanks for all your supportive e-mails over the past week.

Warkentin Down Under

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-03-20T07:18:10-07:00

On Sunday, March 18, 2007, I received the following email from Melbourne, Australia. It is by Mark Warkentin, a Santa Barbara native, who married my older brother’s youngest daughter Diana. That makes him my nephew by marriage, an open water swimmer by choice, and an insider about what it’s like to sport among sharks and jellyfish. It's hard to tell how violent a 5K race is when you watch it from the sidelines.... As with water polo, you don’t catch the roller derby underneath the water. I was told, just like every other swimmer in Saturday’s race, to get to the second spot and pull the draft off of the first swimmer. This is a great idea if there are only four or five legitimate contenders in the race as there were at the U.S. Nationals last year.... Kilda Beach for the World Open Water Championships this week to determine who gets to go the Olympics next year. If every single one of them is trying to get to the second position at the same time, someone will succeed. ...I was positioned next to Germany’s defending World Champion, Thomas Lurz. Seeing the fortune of this position, I decided to follow Lurz around for most of the race and try to make a move at the end. Hence when the gun went off, I held my position next to Lurz and then gradually let him move slightly ahead so that I was in his slipstream. As we approached the first turn, I realized that this was a very, very, very stupid idea. Lurz was not in first place. A Greek had taken the race out quickly, and Lurz was in the coveted second spot. That put me in about 5th to 8th position. I say 5th to 8th because I was right on Lurz’s heels.... As we neared the turn buoy, the pack crowded more tightly, everyone trying to get as close to the buoy as possible. To swing out wide around the buoy and avoid the melee would mean a longer distance to swim. Longer in swimming is like a group of 40 people trying to crowd into an elevator. Whoever doesn’t make it has to run up 80 flights of stairs. ...Your first inclination might be to retaliate against someone who accidentally hits you or elbows you or kicks you to the floor. But you figure, Well, we are all part of the human family; we’re all headed in the same direction; we all have to breathe. Then you realize there are at least six people who are hitting you. ...And everyone else in that elevator would love to be doing the same. There were so many targets of opportunity, it was hard to pick just one for some concentrated pain. I got punched in the mouth with an elbow, and for a moment thought that I might lose my front teeth again. A forearm smacked into my back while at the same time my arms were tangled and my legs were being pulled back to the floating dock. I’m not sure yanking on other people’s arms is technically swimming, but that how others and I made it around the buoy. And that’s when it struck me that we had been kids playing in a backyard wadding pool compared to what was coming up. The second turn buoy floated 50 meters ahead, and bodies boxed me in on all sides. There was no draft to take advantage of. We were in a drag of conflicting forces, and there was nothing to do but to endure another slugfest as we closed on the buoy ahead. ...The race unfolded with the first three guys swimming in a line, a mass ...The Greek struggled to stay first; Lurz was pulling in his draft; and a Russian was in third. Lurz eventually won while I stayed with the pack and closed with a whimper. From the second to the third lap of the four-lap race, I sustained enough bodily harm to drop from 5th or 8th position to a definite 17th place at the finish. As I turned the last buoy, a Canadian landed a forearm to my lower back. Knowing that I had no hope of medaling, I lost all sense of Christian charity, and let my anger and frustration have their way with him. Unfortunately I’m not very skilled or assertive with my punches and ended up just bumping into him quite a few times, never landing a direct hit. After we finished, the Canadian took off his goggles, looked at me, smiled and said, “Well, it was it a bit rough out there, eh?” as if he were Dudley Doright of the Mounties just back from a brisk walk. I woke Sunday morning with an eye socket that felt like Cyclops after a run in with Ulysses. You have to wear your goggles tight to keep the salt water out. Also, the tighter they are, the less likely they’ll come off when you decide to damage someone’s fist with your face. My plan for the 10K on Tuesday is to take it out faster. ...isn’t as close to the start as before (probably about 800 meters), and the second turn is 400 meters after the first, so it shouldn’t be quite as rough as the first lap of the 5K. The problem with taking it out fast is that people will draft off of you and thus conserve energy, energy that is needed to either win the race or survive all the fights. As of Tuesday morning, Pacific Daylight Savings Time in the U.S., the 10K race is over, but I haven't heard from Mark or gotten any news results of the outcome, except that swimmers came out of the water covered in welts from stinging jellyfish.... If they ever make torture an Olympic event, he is a sure bet for the Gold.

Ripped Off

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-03-10T08:39:32-08:00

Robert Ito is a Canadian-born former ballet dancer who became an actor in the 1960s. Not just any old actor but the first to play a ninja on American television. In a 1973 Kung Fu episode called “The Assassin,” Ito’s character is a crippled blacksmith who doubles as a Japanese master in the art of suddenly becoming very limber, dressing in black, throwing shurikins around in a menacing manner, disappearing in a puff of smoke and leaving David Carradine to take the blame. That marital arts trivia came to me as gospel from one of the two writers of the episode. The writer in question...Something Spooner (hey, cut me some slack: it was 34 years ago)...offered to get a spec treatment I had written for Kung Fu to the Warner Brothers brass because, as Mr. SS put it, “I’ve been promised a favor, and if your treatment grabs ’em, we’re co-writers. ...My new partner and I submitted the treatment a month or so before the middle of the second season. In the third and last season we had heard nothing in response when I caught a bit of an episode in which Caine is trapped in a cave where he has hallucinations of Aztec demons. The scenes I saw generally looked and sounded like they came from the treatment SS and I had turned in. There was the usual water-downed Zen that was supposed to infuse new thematic blood into the Western. At best those Shaolin Temple imitations were reworked Love Generation slogans from the ’Sixties. “Just as war hurts flowers and children and other living things, so too, Grasshopper, does the Colt .45 single-action Frontier revolver.” “But Master Poo, is it not also called Peacemaker because it kills tyrants?” Sometimes the series wove in Carradine’s input that his character shouldn’t wear shoes or ride a horse because....... But Aztec hoodoo in a cave couldn’t have been spontaneously conjured by someone else. ...His name was on the treatment, but he was so used to producers saying they owed him a favor but never coming through, he ate humble pie as if were cherry ala mode. I think he went on to be an unaccredited script doctor whereas I, young as I was, sought justice. I was acquainted with a lawyer who had been agent but was now back plying his wiles in the Legal Affairs Department of Warners. I telephoned him, and told him what was in the treatment and what I had seen on TV. ...Even if you win, it will take years to settle. So, we end up paying court costs and your lawyer’s fees, and you end up with what?... I say you move on to something else.” Pausing to think about that, I remembered having a few after work scotches with Warren Bush, the Executive in Charge of Production for the David L.... Warren had hired me for a staff position in the Research & Development Department. Although we had our ups and downs, he was as much of a mentor as I ever had in the entertainment industry, as well as something of a father figure. I enjoyed hearing him talk about his experiences as a B-29 navigator in World War II. After doing his bit to fire bomb flowers and children and a lot of murderous thugs, Warren got a job in the CBS News Division in New York. He talked amusingly of his California exploits, taking up gliding and acrobatic flying, and of some recent craziness regarding the Jacques Cousteau specials. In the editing wing of our building, a cutter had pasted a sign to his door. The sign played off the title of the movie about Depression Era marathon dancers, starring Traitor Jane and Gig Young. The sign expressed sentiment about what it was like to make the happy crew of The Calypso appear so sober, so scientific, so proto Al Gore. ...Warren claimed that when he first met Jacques Cousteau, the former French Navy captain was fixated on using television only to sell tickets to his Queen Mary museum. It took some talking to convince the inventor of the aqua lung to get behind the environmental impact of Warren’s hype, “The poet of the sea.” Alex, who worked with me in R & D, used to do a great faux French accent, which I can’t come close to recreating, so imagine Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau saying, “Suddenly, I had to leave pressing concerns in Tahiti and helicopter to The Calypso anchored off the Aleutians. In my year long absence the poor, motherless seal pup had mysteriously died.” On this evening, however, the talk was not about Captain Cousteau and the merry crew of The Calypso. It was about me! To me that’s always a headliner.... Anyway, Warren drew on his cigar, having given up Merits, and said philosophically: “In this business you can’t worry about having your ideas stolen.... But you have to get them out there, and if you’re any good, you’ll always have more.” Suddenly, I left the Papua, New Guinea, of my memories and choppered in to the sordid Calypso of the present. “Yeah, you’re right,” I grudgingly said to the lawyer. After we hung up, I muttered what Dean Goodwin, another cohort from the Wolper days, always said before he killed himself, “F___ it if you can’t take a joke.” Years later I channel surfed into a rerun of the Kung Fu episode in contention. I could hardly believe my eyes it was so awful! I didn’t remember anything in the treatment about some snotty Imperial Prince poisoning young Caine. I thought the prince was supposed to be a rattlesnake. I vaguely recalled an Indian maid taking care of Caine as he suffered from severe flashback. Finally, I concluded that all that junk clinging to the plot had to be SS’ work. ...I still had plenty of good ideas left waiting to be stolen.

God Winked

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-02-20T12:22:48-08:00

You might have missed it. Last week an 18-year-old Bosnian immigrant, his pockets loaded with ammunition, shot and killed five people and wounded four more at Salt Lake City’s Trolly Square Mall. An off-duty policeman named Kenneth K. Hammond was taking his wife to an early Valentine’s Day dinner when he stopped further massacre by pulling his concealed weapon and shooting the Bosnian dead. A psychologist from Vanderbilt University suggested that American society had not allowed the lad to be truly himself because it marginalized his native culture, thus creating resentment that led to the killing spree. Salt Lake’s Mayor quickly assured the city’s Bosnian immigrants that his administration would crack down on insensitive subordinates who suggested a link between the misunderstood youth and the supposed hate-America rhetoric preached from mosques and perhaps circulating among the Bosnian community. The FBI, echoing the Bureau’s past edicts on lone Muslim rampages, said there were no terrorist motives involved in the latest slaughter. Finally, most national news outlets gave only cursory coverage to the story and largely ignored the heroics of Officer Hammond. Overlooking Officer Hammond was partially due to the popular media's priority of filling in the public on the sordid details surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith. But there is a more pervasive underlying factor at work in even the most staid and respectable newsrooms. Long standing editorial policies consciously censor "good gun" stories. These would be any of the approximately 50,000 yearly incidents in which a citizen pulls a firearm to save his life and/or the lives of others, prevents rape or protects property. On a happier front was the news ignored a month earlier when McNaughton’s Comet, named for its Australian discoverer, became visible to the naked eye. For about two weeks it kept close to the Western horizon and swept wondrously from Northern to Southern Hemispheres. As photographer Keri Scaggs put it, “God winked, but most people weren’t paying attention.” Keri likes to hunt and doesn't borrow a gun for it, but regardless of how politically incorrect that may be, she meant that God winked in a friendly, non-threatening and possibly even amused way. I find myself wondering about a peculiar meaning for wink as used in telecommunications to denote the interruption of a signal. That usually is considered a bad thing, but it could be a friendly wake-up call that something is broken, like a whole nation with its collective eyes turned from heaven and fixed on news media for information, and its hopes pinned to government for protection. # I've linked to my novel Something in Common, the opening chapter of which offers an R rated description of the background that brings a fictional Bosnian to our shores. He is a non-Muslim, a titular Christian, a sociopathic creep. By offering the link here, I hope I allay fears that I may be biased against a particular group from that human abattoir that used to be Tito's Yugoslavia.

The Sporting Life

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-02-02T12:23:44-08:00

Had I been pressed for specifics, I would have said each is named after its home city and associated mascot, a timeless truth if there ever was one. ...The East West Game airs weeks before football’s de facto national holiday and involves college all stars playing for charity; whereas the Super Bowl throws big bucks at pros who are presented as if contestants for American Idol. ...Still, the Super Bowl could use a little ribbing for the teen keen MTV graphics, the gaudy Vegas half time show, and all the pre-, post- and in-between hyperactive announcers, including at least one woman to prove how the network isn’t all butch. Forty years ago when the hype was a lot more primitive, there were two independent football leagues, the National and the American, and their top teams first played against each other on January 15, 1967, in what was billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship of Football. ...But there was a time before, when the likes of John Wayne and Gary Cooper were just plain stars, and football was more about playing on spotty grass than having the Rockettes high kicking on Astro Turf. ...I loved all of football, from blocking drills to playing, from long bus rides to other farming towns to finally getting a dollar to eat at some greasy spoon on the way home. ...By the second week we were still starless, but we were now a team very much aware of who was in charge—the last man in America to field a single wing offense. ...I knew that as soon as I snapped the ball there would be two defensive guards all over me, and if the opposing team had done any scouting at all, a linebacker would be attending the party. ...Whoever ultimately had possession then ran behind a wall of bodies—a pulling guard, sometimes two, the blocking back, the wing back and the strong side end—as they cleared whatever territory they could at the line of scrimmage. ...If you are used to playing only against teams whose quarterbacks stand directly over their centers, and the line of scrimmage is steps away from any handoff, the single wing would look as strange as something from the Jurassic Period, “terrifying” in the sense that you had not prepared for a Brontosaurus to come lumbering onto the field. But in the time period in which I played, every high school in the central coastal region of California, had about ten years’ worth of preparation, making the Mustang offense something like a pre-Cambrian infestation of blue-green algae. ...What they couldn’t do was sustain momentum against a bunch of gang-tackling crazies who were worried that Granny might show up in the showers and shame us all. ...That way I know who and what not to vote for, and when I go into an election both, it is with warm and fuzzy thoughts for my high school coaches. ...I suppose it’s OK to retain a few things from the past, but you should stick them in same shoebox in the attic where you’re pretty sure your Boy Scout knife is too. ...What was important to me at the end of he ’64 season was knowing that I wasn’t good enough to play college ball, and that I didn’t have he charisma to cajole 22 guys to come over to the back yard someday to thump around. ...When I was in California, I came home one evening and told my father a tall tale about doing something so spectacular in practice Coach was moving me from the defensive line to the offensive backfield where I could better score touchdowns. ...That night as I lay staring at the darkened ceiling of my bedroom and listed to the damned leaves blowing into the yard I would have to rake, I vowed that someday somehow I would intercept the pass from center and run the ball for a tie-breaking TD. ...One way, due to the fact that blocking another player is illegal, is to offer yourself up for being tackled as a replacement for a back’s having to dirty himself. You do have to be in possession of the ball for a short time before the fall, but usually a back is coming up fast to grab the glory. ...If you happen to be tackled while in possession of the ball and it doesn’t “knock on,” i.e, squirt forward, curling over the ball with your body will allow an impromptu ruck to form. ...Once the infracted is carried from the field on a stretcher, the forwards from each side grab each other in the most impolite ways, keep low to the ground in order to have spinal problems for the rest of heir lives and push en masse against each other to gain advantage over the ball tossed between them. ...If their side of the scrum is overwhelming the other (and they are clawing and biting mightily to make sure their version of Planet of the Apes never lets Chuck Heston off the space ship), then the hooker can more easily heel or hook the ball to the back forwards. ...Whether a lock is gaining forward momentum or being screw backwards into the ground like a human tent peg, his head is meant to be firmly wedged between the pelvic girdles of one prop and the hooker, lads who won’t be taking showers until after an hour of nearly non-stop running. ...Jock straps are the only protective gear in rugby although some forwards would sport linen headbands to keep their ears from cauliflowering with scar tissue, which is bound to happen if your head rubs against enough moving butts and hairy thighs. ...Throwing the ball forward is illegal in rugby, so there are a lot of laterals, the backs swaying in fluid lines from one sideline to the other, a lovely sight to behold when done well. ...I think the ball had to go out of bounds, and a player from the team not responsible got to throw it back in bounds.... At 4,000 feet above sea level other forwards played smart, took the time to catch their wind, think about past mistakes and ways to improve, and waited for the ball to come down on its own. ...I never made the cut from junior varsity to varsity, but I did set a school record for the Mustangs by fouling out in one minute and thirty seconds.... Within the same period I was fouled twice myself and got a chance at two free throws, both of which I missed, making for some very bad play within a very short period of time. ...Of course, I didn’t have much court time representing the City of King, but I would suit up, do the warm up drills and watch the stands for two 15-year-olds to show. ...In Stanford’s math placement test I scored second lowest of the 1,200-plus students in my class, so I had re-learn everything I took in high school, going to bonehead math five afternoons a week for no credit. ...After books were added, I didn’t darken the doors, but if someone in my dorm had a stack of books for a Western Civ paper, I’d borrow a few to come up with my own topic.... I can’t remember whose books I used for my paper, either the friend’s or someone else’s in the dorm, maybe both, but while they went on about the Ancient Mastodons losing their prettiest woman to Odysseus or somebody who wouldn't use any protection, I culled the same material to get a better grade with “The History of Torture.” ...In other words, I went into my sophomore year with a plummeting GPA and as a rah-rah boy just when radicalism carpet-bombed campuses across the land, throwing out pot, free love, LSD and anti-war sentiment as shrapnel, and hitting traditional values everywhere. ...I thought I could look forward to at least boosting a female cheerleader to my shoulders and looking up her skirt, but that sort of thing was suddenly regarded as sexist and ultra double not cool. ...Rhino’s massive body did not move a scintilla, but as he stood where Best Man had left him, he looked down with a mixture of bewilderment and pity to where Best Man had bounced off. ...My arm came out of sling within a couple of weeks, a laugh riot compared to, say, heart surgery or being fired so that the project executive can hire her boyfriend or having a few martinis for lunch and arriving back at the office only to discover a presentation has to be on the five o’clock flight to New York. ...Today the university throws males and females together in the same rest room facilities, and tells parents to buzz off if they want a looksee at their precious one’s grade transcripts or any STD lab results from the Student Health Center. ...Because I had just discovered club rugby and, like déjà vu to Michaelhouse, was playing for the Indians’ 2nd XV, I’m pretty sure I didn’t promise to quit everything. ...The 2nd XV played against other Pacific Eight colleges, but more fun was being mismatched against rugby unions around San Francisco Bay, clubs like the Olympic and the Ramblers and the Didn’t Make Junior Partners. ...That’s when I realized there is a huge difference between being physical fit for sport and medically unfit for getting shot at, a topic I’ll cover in a future essay, God willing I should live so long. ...The day he changed my life, he was on the 1st XV scrimmaging against the 2nd, and we were facing each other as opposing forwards in a lineout. ...I wasn’t proving anything but stubbornness by bringing an “F” in Chemistry up to “D” and a “D” in Physics up to an earth shattering “C-.“ To avoid failing Calculus, a reasonable assumption after flagging the midterm, I dropped the class for yet another Incomplete. ...Sadly for the world, I cannot validate my theory that the Stanford Linear Accelerator has nothing to do with subatomic particles but is really a giant pinball machine set up to hustle extraterrestrials in games of chance they can’t possibly win, what with their Venusian crab claws and all. ...I saw him in his last fight when he was 70-plus years old and had to let go of his cane to bloody the nose of 60-year-old whippersnapper who had said something disparaging about one of his sons. ...Thanks to a friend who tutored me for free every single day until the final (we took only Friday afternoons off for bar hopping), I squeaked out of my fifth try at Calculus was a “C-.” By the next day I awoke from a celebratory hangover, my mind completely wiped clean of any knowledge of the subject, which makes me more sure that some ticked off alien was trying to get back at humanity for being suckered at the so-called “Linear Accelerator." What I knew for a certainty was that from Second Grade on I had no intention of becoming a doctor, a fact I just wasn’t used to broadcasting too loudly around my family. My dad kept saying, “You can do anything you want once you get your MD,” thus underscoring his fear that going straight into the arts would turn me into a homosexual or a drunkard. ...A few had been on our high school’s championship football team, which made them forget the basketball record a year earlier.

A Soldier's Opinion

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-01-29T22:46:05-08:00

I can't authenticate the content or the veracity of the author, but I believe what he is saying needs to be read. ...It comes straight from the horses mouth from a member of the First Cavalry Division on the ground in Iraq who oughtto know.... "Horse people" is a term the writer uses to identify members of the First Cav who wear what we always affectionally referred to as the "horse blanket" patch on their shoulder whichis a large yellow patch with a black stripe and a horses head on it.... Subject: An American Soldier's view of the problems in Iraq ...The Following is an article about Bush's national address and troop increase. I thought it was a good idea to let you all know what the perspective is over here. I'm tired of hearing the media's skewed version, the politicians squabbling over what they read in a report, and the average ill-informed American ranting about things he knows NOTHING about. ...I've been over here a couple of months now, and I've learned more about this country than a year's worth of watching CNN. I've sat in mission briefs with Colonels, talked with village elders, had tea with Shieks, played with the kids. ...The Shiites are in the majority, but Saddam was a Sunni, so he kept the Shiites in check.... Now that Saddam is gone, the Shiites have taken control of Baghdad.... So the young Sunni men, who can no longer go to work and support their families, do what all young men would do. ...They largely do not concern themselves with the U.S. troops. The insurgents who battle the Coalition Forces are from outside the country.... Even though the country is controlled by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, downtown Baghdad is controlled by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Shiites follow al-Sadr and thus the Prime Minister does what al-Sadr says. Think of it as if a warlord controlled New York and blackmailed the President into diplomatic immunity. When 1st Cav (mainly 2/5 Cav) came here in 2004, they took downtown Baghdad (known as Sadr City) by force. It cost many lives, but after a year, we held an iron grip on the largest insurgent breeding ground in Iraq.... But when 1st Cav left, al-Sadr influenced the Prime Minister to kick out the Coalition forces from that area of Baghdad.... But all that happened was al-Sadr regained control of his cty, and it is now a heavily guarded fortress.... And we cannot go back in becuase the Prime Minister won't let us. Our hands are tied. ...The insurgents that battle the Coalition Forces are from Syria, Somalia and dozens of other places outside of Iraq.... They train by teaching them to attack the military forces here.... Both Iran and Syria have openly proclaimed their number one goal in life is to destroy the great Western Devil and the little Western Devil (America and Britain). ...Al-Sadr will get to "run" the country and live like a king, but in reality Iran will pull the puppet strings. ...thousands of radical Shiites who will do whatever a l-Sadr tells them to. And Iraq will be used as a breeding ground for terrorism.... The Iraq Study Group advised we should let Iran and Syria help with rebuilding? Bravo to President Bush for striking that idea down and vowing to keep those two countries out of Iraq. ...My platoon visited an average Sunni village on a patrol a few days ago. Their only source of income was to farm, as they could not go to the city to work for fear of violence. Many of the young men had already run off to join the militia for no other reason than to feed their families. They had no school or hospital near them and the community was dying.... Afterwards he invited me and my Platoon Leader to sit in his house and have tea with him, and we talked about the situation. ...The Shiites kill the Sunnis because al-Sadr tells them to do so.... They are glad Saddam is dead (Sunni or not), but do not want to replace him with another dictator in a politician's clothes (which is what al-Sadr will become).... These are the words that came out of the elder's mouth: "We do not want America here, and America does not want to be here.... America must use the might of its giant army and sweep through, root out and destroy the militias. ...What appears to have happened within our diplomatic community, is that Prime Minister finally realizes that his days are numbered. If al-Sadr remains, he will be kicked to the curb. So hopefully he is about to allow us to reenter Sadr City, root out and destroy the enemy. A dramatic troop increase will allow us to do this. And the Horse People are back and ready to finish what they started over 2 years ago. If leave now, it will be a failure for democracy. Iran will control Iraq and the end result will be more terrorist attacks on America. The American people don't want soldiers dying over here, but its better than American civilians dying over there.... The moment we loosen our grip on the noose, they will do it again. And the only way to root out the evil here is to stop beating around the bush, increase troops and destroy the insurgents once and for all.... We are the only ones who can stop al-Sadr.

The True Meaning of Christmas

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-01-05T09:42:29-08:00

The best of the holiday season for my wife and me was a grandson coming into the world. Medical complications with my daughter forced a longer than expected hospital stay for her, but the insurance company insisted that my grandson was as healthy as a horse and should be tossed out of the ward. The result is a bottle-fed baby. This, as everyone knows, dooms him for jail or worse. I conducted the 6 AM feedings, during which I would contemplate the upbringing of my generation. When we were in utero, many of our mothers were throwing back G & Ts before dinner. Our emotionally distant fathers were off working and having the odd nightmare about killing Japs and Krauts. Need I say they were racists? When we became viable fetuses, we had to suck down that goby white formula forced on the world by Big Pharmaceutical Companies, and Horror of Horrors! this often was in the midst of secondhand smoke brought on by Big Tobacco. Sure, we got Roy Rodgers and Captain Midnight on television, but those weekly shows could hardly mitigate the daily effects of cigarettes and gin in our formative years. Then we went to college, and got thrice weekly- and sometimes- daily doses of what might be compared to the anti-depressant Welbutrin, changing the label to Zoloft and marketing it as a stop-smoking aid. Call it History, Sociology, Comparative Religions, Theater Arts, even Engineering, it was all just an excuse for most of our professors to preach Marxism mixed with hedonism. So what did we do? Burned bras and draft cards, and for a lot of us boys, we looked for what we had missed as infants--bare Triple D mammaries. We were victims. It was terrible, just terrible.

Riding the A List

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2006-12-13T16:04:59-08:00

In 1997 the organizers of a conference called Selling To Hollywood invited me to be on that year’s writing panel, The Road To Success. To pick up the honorarium, it was expected that I actually appear at hotel in the Valley where conferees from all over the country had paid for a weekend of hearing from A List producers, directors, agents, lawyers and the likes of me. ...Then I fired up my burnt orange, two-door Cadillac with the brushed steel and padded vinyl roof. The Caddy was a classic, made when wetlands were still called swamps. It had an audio system just waiting for an eight-track tape of the Bee Gees, and you could almost land an airplane on the hood, under which came the careless hiss of the fuel injected, four-barrel carb sucking in natural resources like a vampire with hemophilia. I lived in an oceanfront apartment building, on the wetlands side, and as the Caddy angled up out of the underground garage, blocking my view of everything save hood and sky, a blue heron screeched.... Small children who had never been driven to a play date in anything bigger than a Saab stood agog. ...Nine months earlier when I still had some dregs left in my career, I had been invited to the conference. At that time my agent Lawson “I thought he was dead” Beavers called every six months or so to let me know that he was alive but still too busy to talk about any work for me. With a call now three months overdue, I was sure that one of us was terminally ill. Driving up the 405 North, I wasn’t sure what the future would bring, whether I’d be able to pay overdue rent, but I certainly wasn’t going to chance having to pay for parking. That was one reason I nosed the Caddy into the service parking lot of the hotel and left it for the help to stare at. I slipped through a hedge, put the smell of Dumpsters to my back and sashayed up to the main entrance like I was a citizen of he greatest country on earth and everyone else was an illegal alien. ...The Road To Success session had 45 minutes before start time I could feel butterflies gathering in my belly, and before 45 minutes were up, they all would be skittering off the flight path. ...The bright lights of the panel were a writing team fresh from a hit feature and a three-picture development deal at hundred grand a pop, more if their scripts made it to the screen.... The other two panelists were producer/writers, one of whom had a couple of hit series listed in the program notes. A rule of thumb about entertainment incomes is that producers, directors and series writers own real estate. ...Say my name with some progesterone behind it, and you’ve got my full attention. ...Christine Foster headed the Research and Development Department at Wolper Productions where I cut my teeth in show business. Before I met her, she had been a noviciate in a nunnery in Florida, jumped the wall for Hollywood but remained a devout Catholic.... Now I was telling her about my conversion and giving her the straight dope about my circumstances. ...She told me about becoming a literary agent and how hard it was to get work for any writer. She said some nice things about Lawson “I thought he was dead” Beavers. She asked me if I knew that she was moderating the upcoming panel. ...If they’re not broadcasting your license number and asking you to move your car, or requesting that you step out of the aircraft for a full body search, hearing your name on a public address system can be rather pleasant.... I was talented, I was a gentleman, I was watching an audience of 300-plus begin to believe that I was the star of the panel. ...She asked other panelists questions, but a lot of them were tagged with, “And, Jeff, what do you think?” ...Christine had work to go to, and panelists were ushered to separate tables where conferees could line up for face time. There was a black man who kept waiting off to the side until the very end of the time allotted for one-on-one. He was a reporter for a major daily, meaning that it wasn’t in California. He told me matter-of-factly that he could put a call into The White House and expect President Clinton to either pick up or get back to him within an hour or so. ...I had said some things that, when he read between the lines, made him uneasy about switching careers. ...Besides girls, that was all we seemed to talk about in college, and at times recreation could be deadly serious too.... It was my turn to fold, call his bet or up the ante. As I fingered what was left of my chips, he said very kindly, “Don’t play any more. ...To Bill I owe the fact that had some money left for other aspects of my misspent youth. There was no way I could pay Bill back for seeing that I was a horrible gambler and relaying the truth as best he could. ...I told him that nine months ago my Honda had been repossessed.... It sputtered into the service lot of the hotel like a consumptive checking into a sanatorium.... I was praying that it wouldn’t seize up on the Sepulveda Pass when I went home. I added that I was at least as talented as any other writer on the panel. I had a good agent who worked his tail off for me, but because he hadn’t been able to scare up any business lately, he was too embarrassed to call. ...I had planned to go home but I stuck around for the dinner that the sponsors were giving for the weekend’s panelists. I drank too much wine, my least favorite of adult beverages, but I wasn’t going to pay for drinks at the bar. I danced too long with a woman whose name and story I have both forgotten. ...Not long afterwards my wife said, “We’ve had our ups and down, but all this time you have provided for me and the children. ...I still work occasionally for relatively low pay but can thankfully report that my wife drives off every morning in a Lexus SUV. Left alone, I sometimes recall when I was an A List writer and a so-so human being. Whenever the conference comes to mind, my being any kind of writer doesn’t matter. I remember some very good people and dare to think I might have been one of them.

The Gospel According to Johnny Carson

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2006-12-10T15:47:55-08:00

I call it a revelation, how the former host of The Tonight Show put the bible in perspective for me. At the time I was ignorant of Johnny Carson being anything but a comedian. The only bible I had laid a hand on was in court. I was innocent, I swear, but justice running amuck is a different story. Before Johnny Carson became the King of Late Night Television, he took over from Edgar Bergman in hosting an afternoon quiz show, Who Do You Trust? Perpetual sidekick Ed McMahon would occasionally correct the grammar. “It should be ‘Whom.’ Whom Do You Trust?” Whichever way you put it, it’s a good question. It began rattling around my mind last week as I read a book published in 1953 by a scholarly pastor who was head of a high dollar church in Washington, DC. His thesis used the relatively new discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to reveal that Jesus was probably not historical and definitely not divine, but if such a man existed, he was brainwashed by the end times messianic propaganda of the Essens, members of an extremist sect of Judaism, who were guardians of the scrolls. If gospel writers held contrary opinions to the pastor, it was because they were hawking a myth. The First Century Jewish historian Josephus had described the Essens, but if his description didn’t back up the pastor’s claims about the sect, it was due to Josephus selling out to the Romans. Besides, José had ever been near the Dead Sea. Maybe he hadn’t. I sure haven’t. What I’ve seen of the photographs of the scrolls, their writing might as well be chicken tracks. I have no idea if it is correct, the author’s assertion that most scholars of the Old and New Testaments think the scriptures are irrelevant to modern life, present a crock of nationalistic stepped-in-what? and rehash folklore clearly stolen from surrounding pagan cultures. Maybe. Just as easily, it could be that Jimmy Carter’s assertion of being a Christian is another case of stepped-in-what? The man hammers nails in his retirement, does some writing; that’s all I truly know. I am aware of- but have never met- biblical scholars who thoroughly disagree with the pastor who wrote the book. Allegedly, they’re not all fundamentalists, but they do start with the assumption that the biblical texts don’t have to be wrong. As a lowly, untutored hack, I see vast difference in at least the English translations of pagan creation stories and the Genesis account. Maybe if I spent time in seminary and learned Hebrew and Greek, I could find a few more examples. Depending on the seminary, of course. In the meantime the only side I can count on regarding Jesus or Moses, or a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with the bible, like automobiles causing the “Little Ice Age” of the 14th Century or whether the Holocaust really took place, is who do I trust? Sorry. Whom. About the same time the pastor’s book on the scrolls came out, C.S. Lewis addressed a conference of Anglican clergy in England. He stated that the laity did not know what most Anglican priests truly thought of traditional doctrines and popular beliefs. Then he warned, if ordinary people did find out, the clergy would be addressing empty pews. He wondered in an essay on the subject: why people so adamantly non-Christian still wanted the label? Psst, Clive! Can you hear me? The money. Those boys couldn’t attract an audience unless they had collars on. Who else but the church was going to pay them to billow and squeak? The American pastor was beyond warning. He was being very daring long before the Sixties made controversy comfortable. Although he died and went to God knows where, his church looks to be thriving. According to the internet site, it is planning to celebrate Kwanza right after Santa Claus comes. With a few notable exceptions, the Church of England also seems to be navigating the post-modern waters with some success. Her architectural landmarks attract hordes of tourists and make for great echo chambers.

Allegory

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2006-12-07T05:21:03-08:00

In the early seventies there was a large, growing charismatic ministry in Orange County headquartered near Knott's Berry Farm. A friend of mine worked for the ministry in public relations, and a friend of his, a secretary, came to him fearfully one day to relate a telephone conversation she accidentally picked up on her extension. It was between the head pastor and a man on the East Coast. They were talking about the ministry and how it might better launder money for the Mafia. "What do we do?" she asked. He thought a moment. "Quit," he said. Not so long ago my friend faced down a drug-addled punk threatening his family, so he's no coward. But he’s always been prudent. What he understood those thirty-plus years ago was that a mere secretary and a new college graduate with an expectant wife could not right a terrible wrong. He was aware that local cops and FBI agents, or just their curious secretaries, could not always be trusted with secrets. Sometimes they took bribes. "Quit," was a good answer for a man with a growing family. "Let's go to the law," would have been a bad one. As far as I know, the ministry was never caught out, but over time it dwindled in influence, the number of congregates falling sharply. Yesterday afternoon all this came back to me in a strange way. I was brooding on the Senate's approval of a Chamberlain-like Secretary of Defense and the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to the President to get out as soon as possible. Both, I thought, must be the morale boosters for the Mafia and disheartening for-- My friend's story was taking on an unexpected allegorical bent. The Mafia is Islamic fascism. The ministry is the United States of America. The law is a lot of wishful thinking: that the U.N. might do something; that Saudi Arabia is an ally; that Syria and Iran aren't already engaged against us; that it's OK for a while longer to send men to die for something we're planning to walk away from. The friend? He's someone like me, or maybe you, who marvels at the corruption of thought prevailing among our leaders but knows full well that one can't do a thing about it. It is nations, not individuals, that make war, win, capitulate or surrender. Iraq's immediate reaction to events here was a call for a "regional solution" to the war. Whatever else that means, it puts Iran in charge, and the leadership there has already said what it is planning to do--produce nukes, wipe out Israel and put the West under a caliphate. Allegories can be stretched only so far, which is why I’m switching to an historical comparison. A family man in the Philippines in 1941 would have been well advised to find a rabbit hole. Whether a Japanese tank rolled over it was outside his province. Praying was called for because which side will dwindle is always up for grabs. But even if it is your enemy’s side, what happens in the short run can be pretty ugly and take years from which to recover. The fellow I'm now working for sent following news item. It shows what the intelligentsia in America has on its mind, a kind of Maginot Line made up of lies and half-truths about your automobile and American industry being the real problems.

Erratum

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2006-11-30T12:19:53-08:00

The blog below...I love the way that sounds...the blog below behooved a reader of PoliticalMavens.com, where the Peter Baldwin story also appeared, to suggest that I might have been thinking of Vladimir Horowitz. I can hear Peter imitating the stage mother, "....will you finally listen to the great Horowitz?" My problem is with Vladimir. Don't like the name. Never have. My Spell Check always underlines it in red. I'm sure there may be one or two Vlads who play piano, but the great majority are in Lubyanka Prison pulling nails out or in the Kremlin ordering worse. Speaking of prison, I am currently editing a book against a looming print deadline, which feels something like being in an isolation cell next to the lethal injection room. There's even a chaplain, as it were, checking in every day to listen to my comments and confessions. For example, he reads this site, and it really upsets him when he sees a new blog entry. The main reason is that he is the author of the book, and related to that is the fact that a new blog entry means that I'm not... ....OK, so the book's on hold while I think for a moment. I could be playing a computer game. No thoughts there. Zero. Or I could be looking at pornography. Lots of thoughts there but confusing. How can three people actually do that? And where do you find a telephone booth these days? But that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the transition between Chapter Five and-- There's the phone. It's ringing. Betcha it ain't the Governor calling in a reprieve.

Whatshisname Transforms a Young Life

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2006-11-28T21:56:55-08:00

This story was told to me by Peter Baldwin, an actor turned director. In the 1980s we worked together on an HBO movie that got us both fired and had so much fun we teamed up on pitching a novel about women’s softball to.... I can’t remember. Some production types and I think one network. What I do remember is Peter's describing a certain flight to New York on which he found himself seated next to the great pianist.... I want to say Israel Horowitz, but he’s a playwright. I’m terrible at names, but tell me a story, and I’m with you, ready to make up quotes and fill in the blanks. So there Peter was seated next to Jascha Heifetz, Ferrante & Teicher, Segovia, it doesn’t make any difference. Somebody who could play the piano, and I mean good. They got to talking about what they did. Directing, tinkling the ivories, fending off wannabes who begged to be hired, blessed, referred to whomever could get them a ticket on the Success Express. “I’ve made it my policy,” said the great pianist, “to turn them all away. If someone plays horribly, maybe they are just having a bad day. How can I judge that? Or if they are great, what can I say? You know as well as I that talent doesn’t necessary get you a job or make you a living. How can I play God and encourage someone into a life of poverty? “Ah, but it was on this very same airline, the very same flight number. Four and half, five hours, it felt like twenty. At first sight she seemed like such a nice Jewish lady. But as soon as the wheels were up and we had exchanged pleasantries, she was the Stage Mother from Hell. Her son, her son, I must listen to her son. On and on, and for just a moment’s peace I finally said, ‘Yes.’ “We arranged an audition for ten o’clock the next morning in my hotel suite. I went to bed that night, dreading the dawn. She arrived on time with her son. A wholesome looking lad. I gestured to the piano. I held my breath as he sat down. Then he began to play. “What relief! He wasn’t having either a good day or a bad day. He simply had no talent, and it was clear that happened every day. “When he was finished, I said to him, ‘Young man, you have a great gift. A love of music that will be with you all the days of your life. You can entertain your friends, fill in the hours of solitude. But I am afraid you should never think of a career— ‘“You see!’ his mother cut in. ‘You see! Your father has tried to tell you! I’ve tried to tell you! Your teachers have tried to tell you! You’re no good! Now, for God’s sake, will you finally listen to the great....?’” Jimi Hendricks, John Philip Sousa, I wish I could remember his name.

Election Special II: The Road Well Traveled

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2006-11-09T11:02:51-08:00

My wife and I have spent the last three national elections with a Texas friend named Mark. Two nights ago is the first one in which we felt like crawling away. At the door Mark said, "They didn't cheat. They didn't have great ideas. We just lost it." True enough. With both houses of Congress under Democratic control, President Bush needs to scramble--not for a legacy which feeds only ego and not to explain current policy because he's pretty bad at that. What he needs to do is compromise in the Iraq war. If the radical left doesn't take over the Democrat Party completely, Democrats do not want to be known for appeasement and retreat. But they don't want our troops left forever in the desert. To continue "until victory" sounds like that Arab kid calling plaintively, "Lawrence! Lawrence!" until his head sinks under the quicksand, leaving Peter O'Toole to look appropriately grim. The Administration, therefore, has to delineate goals that are doable and that paint a picture of what Iraq looks like when it can be left to its own devices. For example: X percent of the Iraqi military must take over combat duties by such-and-such a date. Y percent of the police must be on patrol by the same date. Baghdad has to be made secure even if that means draconian martial law, and not enforced by us but by Iraqis. Finally, Z percent of the country's water and power should be working and a set number of key points under heavy guard. Such goals do not have to result in victory, but they do have to provide markers on a road for when our boys can come home relatively unscathed. That could be the same road that eventually leads to victory. Unfortunately, it is the road that Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden have been counting on America to take. We can only pray that they have miscalculated where it leads.