Death of a Matriarch

Barbara Bush

After refusing medical treatment, former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away last week surrounded by her loving children and grandchildren and also that old fart in a wheelchair, her husband, George Herbert Walker Bush. At the funeral this past Sunday, Jeb, the middle child and two term Governor of Florida, referred to his parent's life together as an "amazing love story." George paid tribute to his wife by donning a pair of "book themed socks" gifted to him. The gesture acknowledged his wife's commitment to reading through the nonprofit Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

Barbara's husband had a long career in public service, one which he shared with Jennifer Fitzpatrick, his personal assistant who followed him to many government positions. Known as his "office wife," Jennifer worked for George when he headed the CIA much to Barbara's dismay. During meetings at the CIA, George often donned agency disguises, including a red wig and prosthetic nose for laughs. I suppose you had to be there for it to be funny, but I imagine those that had to be there thought he was nuts.

During the presidential campaign in 1988, Bush took time off to fly Fitzpatrick to Hawaii for 12 days on a government flight for what he said was "a secret meeting of former CIA directors." The CIA claims there were no such meetings nor did Bush have any duties with the CIA after he left. Bush played hide the salami on the Hawaiian islands all while Barbara was back in Kennebunkport raising their loser kids. I know, the visual is unsettling.

Fitzpatrick wasn't the first women leveraging her anatomy for a cushy, government job. When he was the Chair of the Republican National Committee in 1973 little George entertained a woman from North Dakota who divorced her husband and moved to Washington DC to be near him. During the presidential campaign he also boffed an attractive young blonde photographer who was good at flying under the radar. She turned down a position as the White House Photographer due to their romance.

George Herbert Walker Bush

More recently, George groped women in front of his wife while crumbled up in his wheelchair, repeatedly unloading the joke that his favorite magician is "David Cop-a-Feel!" Perhaps George is vying for recognition as a colorful old guy, but unfortunately he still comes off like a senile idiot.

After Hurricane Katrina almost wiped New Orleans off the map, Barbara Bush toured a Houston relocation site when she exclaimed that survivors were faring better than before the storm because many of them "were underprivileged anyway." Then she added,

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas."

Barbara Bush was straight out of her generation. Old people like her use terms like "you people" as in,

"You people are coming and going too much!"

They often ask upon meeting someone what their nationality is because they're affinity depends mostly on similar heritage rather than good deeds. Old women from the 1950s were not cross burning racists, but many certainly believed that crime is predominately caused by specific minority groups. They embraced diversity as long as people were just like them.

This was pointed out by California State University (CSU) English professor, Randa Jarrar, who tweeted an hour after the First Lady's death,

"Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F—- outta here with your nice words."

Jarrar later added,

"I'm happy the witch is dead. Can't wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have."

The professor also countered critics, calling for her termination, by tweeting that she is a tenured professor making $100,000 a year who can't be fired. While I applaud the CSU president for upholding the first amendment right of a Muslim English professor to lampoon an old woman moments after her death, I do urge Jarrar to next time at least wait for room temperature.

The Bush men all piggybacked their way through life on their father's coattails, who ensured they went to good schools like Yale where they profoundly underperformed. Barbara Bush tolerated her geek husband's liaisons with younger women as long as they never crossed into her privileged space. The resentment and loneliness that she bore as a single, married woman brought her great depression which she wrote about in her memoir. She didn't seek psychiatric help or medication for her sorrow, which she later blamed on menopause and the stress of her husband's job as Director of Central Intelligence, which included a special position for Jennifer Fitzpatrick, probably mostly prone.

In 1988, during George Bush acceptance speech for the presidential nomination, he famously unloaded a reference to "a thousand points of light." Near the end of the speech, he returned to the analogy when he rambled on that he would,

"keep America moving forward, always forward—for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light."

The media and the American public had a similar reaction to the obtuse analogy. We all thought,

"What the fuck is he talking about?"

On the campaign trail, Bush also uttered the equally famous phrase,

"Read my lips: no new taxes."

As president, he had to raise taxes to pay for the large deficits incurred by the colossal Regan tax cuts. During his reelection campaign, Bush participated in a presidential debate with Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis when a young women asked a question about the staggering national debt, and if it affected any of them personally. Bush casually looked at his watch, conveying the idea that he was bored. The highlight of his one term presidency was his inability to bowl and throwing up on the Japanese Prime Minister. During the latter event, Barbara stuffed a napkin in George's mouth to prevent an international sushi spewing incident when an agent jumped over the banquet table to lend a hand. Secret Service duty for the Bushes was far less heroic than, say, diving onto the trunk of a motorcade while under fire.

The news media reported that agents were so dedicated to Barbara Bush, whose codename was "Tranquility," that they stood vigil by her coffin. Truth is protecting Barbara Bush was as cushy a government job as it gets when it comes to the Secret Service, who are trained to take a cap in the gut for the president. Watching over Barbara Bush wasn't exactly stressful duty. She often told them to wear a hat when it was cold and made sure they ate plenty of vegetables. Their big evolution when Tranquility was on the move involved taking old lady Bush to her weekly hair appointment. Something tells me the same duty for Hillary is far less cherished.

Four days before leaving office, Barbara's son signed an executive order extending Secret Service protection for his mother, funded by the few people left who actually pay taxes. In 2012, President Obama signed the Former Presidents Protection Act which provides lifetime Secret Service protection. Prior to this security was provided when needed with Richard Nixon being the only president to relinquished Secret Service protection after leaving office.

I'm not sure what love story Jeb was talking about at his mother's funeral. Maybe it was one of those thousand points of light his father always spoke of. Either way, George Herbert Walker Bush has caught his connecting flight to the thereafter so he should square up before the gear comes down.

Something tells me, though, men like him have no regrets. What do you expect from a guy who honors his wife with a pair of socks?

Obstruction of President

Bill Clinton

Back in 1998, after President Clinton was impeached by the House for lying about playing hide the cuban in the Oval Office, the Senate convened to vote on his removal. A legislator in a nearby town held a public meeting in a school gymnasium to hear the people out. CNN covered the event with a chyron that read "Democracy in Action." I thought it was more like "Idiocy in Action."

It took the president cheating with an intern before the American people finally got off their collective fundaments and got involved in the political process. Shrewd politics unfold daily behind closed doors across the country, right under our noses, and we remain clueless. Our legislators carve up a trillion in taxpayer funds each year while the nation's astronomical debt grows out of control, and back then voters were more concerned with flag burning. The President gets his pipes cleaned in the Oval Office, and suddenly everyone wants to voice their opinion.

I used to argue with my father all the time over Bill Clinton's antics including lying to independent councilor, Kenneth Starr, about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. My dad felt the president should be a moral pillar for the country to follow, and I thought the presidency was just a job, a crummy one at that. I didn't really care that Clinton cheated on his wife. In fact, I prefer a dude with his finger on the nuclear button to be as relaxed as humanly possible. Turns out that Clinton couldn't launch anything anyway because when he was president, he lost the nuclear codes.

Bill Clinton did lie to a federal prosecutor, something which would land you and me in prison where we would most likely end up a much larger person's special friend. Starr was assigned to investigate the Clintons over a land deal gone bust called Whitewater and a sexual harassment allegation when Bill was the Governor of Arkansas. After not finding anything to indict Clinton on, Starr went after his relationship with Lewinsky which, however inappropriate as well as a violation of workplace rules, wasn't illegal. Starr's office leaked scandalous details of Clinton's involvement with the young, unpaid, intern chiefly to smear the President in hopes of getting him removed from office. The Starr Report was chock full of sordid details like,

"At one point, Ms. Lewinsky and the President talked alone in the Chief of Staff's office. In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants."

Monica Lewinsky

I recall lawyers endlessly discussing if the term “sex” included fellatio. They also released a video of the White House physician drawing a vial of blood from the President in the Map Room in the presence of a FBI agent and Clinton's attorney. The FBI lab tested Lewinski's semen stained blue dress for the President's DNA. It looked like Clinton was going to resign until an unlikely outrage saved him.

The graphic nature of the Starr Report, co-authored by Brett Kavanaugh, really pissed off the American people. Having a mild mannered lawyer like Kenneth Starr, a guy who just seemed like a creep himself, go after the 49 year old President for messing with a 22 year old intern didn't sit well with the American people. My attitude was along the lines of "who gives a shit" as I reminded my father that his generation looked the other way when JFK and his brother took turns boffing Marilyn Monroe. President Kennedy also employed two women in the West Wing to do nothing more than swim naked in the pool with him. I think they were also in charge of the nuclear codes.

A prominent republican said on the news,

"America ought to know that when they send their children to Washington that their President is not going to molest them."

Lewinsky was not a child. She was fully aware of what she was doing. In fact secret service agent, Gary Byrne, who stood guard outside the Oval Office described Lewinsky as relentless in her pursuit of the President. Byrne was the last person Lewinsky had to circumvent to reach Bill, and she did it often always showing up in places in the West Wing where she was not allowed to be. In his tell all book, Crisis of Character, Byrne writes,

"What (if anything) she did all day as an intern mystified me. Some days she seemingly had nothing better to do than play I Spy the President."

It was only when Lewinsky became aware that her friend and confidant, Linda Tripp, secretly recorded phone conversations did she cave to Starr's threats of a lengthy prison sentence for not cooperating with his investigation. Years later in 2015, Lewinsky delivered a TED talk focusing on cyber bullying and slut shaming. She rambled on about how the episode scarred her tragically focusing on her profound humiliation. Lewinsky also revealed that she was invited to speak at the "Forbes 30 Under 30" event, billed as a search for inspirational "youthful visionaries." I'm not sure exactly how the then 41 year old Lewinsky got in as a keynote speaker since her youthful vision was a bit myopic.

In her TED speech, she referred to her White House indiscretions as "falling in love with my boss" and being "swept up into an improbable romance" even though she performed a recital on the presidential trombone while Bill was on the phone with a member of Congress. Now, I'm no prude by any stretch, but I'm pretty certain that love includes a bit more than what Bill and Monica were doing. Lewinsky expressed that she learned a lot from her youthful mistakes which I'm sure included what's under the Resolute desk.

Back then during the impeachment hearings, I hated watching the news because conservatives were simply attempting to mess with the President while liberals were trying to make excuses for Clinton's behavior. I watched two democrats, one a Black man and another a white woman, try to explain the cigar incident by saying,

"Any of our sexual behaviors would look scandalous if scrutinized by the public."

I suppose this is especially true when it occurs at work with someone who is half the age of our spouse.

Donald Trump

Today, we have yet another special prosecutor looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Lawyers are working overtime to try to prove that President Trump "colluded with the Russians" to hack Hillary Clinton's private email server which was located in her living room in Chappaqua, not behind a secure federal firewall. So far they have found some of what they're looking for resulting in four people charged with crimes and the expulsion of Russian diplomats as well as sanctions against Russia. The problem I have with all this is that the US cyber screws other nations all the time.

In 2010, we fouled up Iran's uranium enrichment centrifuges with a virus spread via thumb drives. We have a history of supporting military coups only to insert our own guy into power after a bloody takeover. We purportedly hacked China's mobile phone companies to spy on the Chinese government and research institutions. In 1982 the CIA inserted a logic bomb in a computer control system stolen from a Canadian company which caused a Soviet gas pipeline to explode. We shutdown North Korea's internet for a weekend when they cyber attacked Sony over the movie, The Interview.

Don Levin, a political science professor at Carnegie Mellon University has determined that the US intervened in 82 elections between 1946 and 2000. The Washington Post reported that the CIA forged "documents to besmirch communist leaders via fabricated sex scandals."

Newt Gingrich

The US has a long history of messing with other countries. So why are we so angry that another country did to us what we do everyday as a matter of foreign policy? The reason is simple, to obstruct the president. Any party with a majority in the House has the power to call for a "special investigation." The minor party relies on charges filed by the House Ethics Committee to attack the major party players.

Back in 1997 the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, leading a republican controlled Congress was hit with 84 ethics charges with only one resulting in an investigation for tax fraud involving a college course Gingrich was teaching. The problem was that he was spreading a conservative political philosophy with tax exempt funds. While the IRS exonerated him, the House reprimanded Gingrich for failing to hire a tax lawyer. They fined him $300,000, part of the cost of the investigation. It was the first time a house speaker was disciplined for ethics violations.

During the subsequent mid term elections, republicans lost five seats. Gingrich, who was reelected himself, was held responsible by republican leaders who maneuvered to give him the boot. Gingrich's private polls indicated that investigating the Lewinsky affair would tank the President and bolster republicans in the House, but the plan backfired costing him his seat.

The partisan attack on Gingrich was countered by a special congressional investigation of Clinton. They appointed Kenneth Starr, a republican to go after the President in an act of revenge for unseating the speaker. Starr leaked all sorts of scandalous sexual details to the press concerning Clinton's fling with Lewinsky. When the infamous blue dress surfaced, Lewinsky initially claimed the stain was spinach dip. Starr must have worked in a dry cleaners in college because he sent that dress to a FBI lab.

So if all these personal attacks were motivated by partisan politics, why did the Department of Justice appoint a republican special counsel, Robert Mueller, to go after a republican president when Congress is controlled by republicans? Mueller came on the scene after Trump shit canned FBI Director, James Comey, presumably to derail his investigation of the Trump campaign's alleged involvement with the Russians. Trump claims he fired Comey for his last minute election shocker indicating Hillary's emails were, yet again, under investigation.

Trump's twitter feed pisses off many people, but elected officials couldn't give a crap about what the President says on social media. They leave the outrage for the small stuff to the small minds. What tanked Trump with both parties was his first budget which made sweeping cuts in efforts to save $54 billion dollars. Trump said,

"We are going to do more with less, and make the government lean and accountable to the people."

This is not how Washington works. Both parties spend big when their candidate is elected. When democrats win the presidency, republicans roll out the Balanced Budget Act to hobble spending. When a republican is in the Oval Office, the democrats talk about "the rich not paying their fair share" in attempts to increase taxes.

Republicans were unhappy because they were not going to get their share of the federal money for their pet projects. Trump reduced spending across the board as any business person would do if they had access to the government books. Bonehead tweets about Mexicans don't really anger politicians. That superficial stuff spurns on mock outrage from our lawmakers. What galvanized both parties to support a DOJ investigation was a change in the way business is conducted in Washington.

Now, a porn star who took a payoff to keep her mouth shut over an alleged affair with Trump wants to give the money back so she can tell her story. Mueller backed an FBI raid on the New York offices of Trump's lawyer looking for information pertaining to hush money, which could be considered an illegal campaign contribution. My attitude towards Trump is the same I had for Clinton twenty years ago. Who gives a shit? Apart from being on Wife Version 3.0, Trump has always been known as a playboy. He didn't lie to a federal investigator about his extra marital relationship like Bill Clinton did. The smear campaign is designed to herd the American public into believing that a self professed germaphobe who doesn't like to shake hands and medically vetted potential girlfriends in the 80's would come in intimate contact with a forty year old adult film star.

And as far as the recording of Trump describing the anatomy grabbing benefits of celebrity, he said,

"...I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, 'I'll show you where they have some nice furniture.'"

Furniture shopping? The only thing I learned from this exchange is that Trump is a geek because only a true nerd would think that the path past a women's underwear is through a Raymour and Flanigan showroom.

The Starr Report cost $80 million in taxpayer funds. Mueller's DOJ witch hunt will likely cost even more as a team of lawyers tries to link Trump to something the government has done for decades. The American people remain painfully ignorant as we are swayed by false news reports written by journalists more interested in celebrity than the truth. During her TED talk, Monica Lewinsky said it best when asked why she was speaking out now. She answered,

"Because it’s time. Time to take back my narrative."

Then she asserted,

"You can insist on a different ending to your story.”

Isn't that what it comes down to? A different ending, that is, wait a few years then reimagine the facts until the American people favor the outcome. That's what public relations people do, leverage our forgetfulness against us. Bill Clinton did just that when he gushed about Hillary in his "I Met a Girl" speech delivered at the Democratic National Convention during the 2016 election. All you got to do is wait fifteen years when the average American has forgotten the past, then rewrite the final scene.

As we decide right from wrong along party lines with journalists creating rather than reporting the news and social media censoring anything that doesn’t conform to the acceptable narrative, we have evolved into a society in which the truth is no longer relevant.

A Hidden Message in Coco?

When I was a kid, my parents took us to movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which I found to be painfully boring in my four year old mind. Whenever they broke into song, I broke into yawns. There was no Star Wars back then. If they did do an episode of that iconic sci-fi, it would be devoid of any actual action and most likely be a musical. You see, children's films in my youth were written for parents, not kids.



Today, animated film often interweaves humor for both generations like when Anna in Frozen says in response to Kristoff inquiring about Hans's foot size,



"Foot size doesn't matter."

When Dick Van Dyke started crooning in his northern British accent during a scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, I asked my father to take me to the loo which I found more interesting than the film. At four years old movies for me were as boring as church. It would be over a decade before the adolescent viewing audiences were rescued by the likes of Indiana Jones.

Recently, my wife and I decided to take our youngest, Willy, to the movies on a weekend when his older brother, Aidan, was away at drill for Sea Cadets. Christine often looks through reviews and critiques on Rotten Tomatoes to find a film. Before long she announced,



 

"Let's go see Coco. I can't find one bad review."

Without asking what the film was about, I agreed because, after all, as the family dad I'm the beta voice when it comes to what we do on the weekends.

Now, Coco is about a boy, named Miguel, who wants to be a musician, but his family, mostly spurned on by his grandmother, refuses to let him play music because his great-great grandfather split on his wife and daughter to go into the world and seek his fortune as a musician. The little girl, abandoned by her father, is Coco, Miguel's great grand mother, who is still alive even though she mostly sits in a wheelchair and squints as she is rolled from room to room in a semi catatonic state. It really blows to get old.

Miguel's family are shoemakers by trade owing to a successful small business started by his great-great grandmother after her husband ditches her and Coco for a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Miguel is expected to work in the family business like Jake Gyllenhaal was supposed to toil in the coal mines instead of being a rocket scientist in October Sky. Miguel wants to enter a talent contest with his makeshift, handmade guitar, but his grandmother smashes the instrument as she espouses the now familiar theme of "the importance of family." I was thinking more along the lines of "family sucks big time," but I kept that to myself.


Unable to procure an instrument, Miguel decides to raid a mausoleum of a famous musician who he discovers in a photo is his relative who chose music over providing for his wife and child in favor of money, fame and groupies. Miguel pilfers the guitar on the eve of the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday in which deceased ancestors are remembered by decorating headstones with photos and leaving food in the cemetery. Ratatouille must love this holiday. Magnolias are also used to adorn the shrines as they are the Flowers of the Dead. When Miguel touches a magnolia pedal, he suddenly can see all the dead people returning for the chow left by their living relatives. They aren't messed up zombies or confused dead people who terrorized Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. There was some attempt to make the corpses cute, but my six year old was having no part of it.

Now this is where this tale deviated from cultural appropriation to cultural aberration. In the movie there are no religious symbols or gestures with the exception of the grandmother making the sign of the cross once. When Miguel travels to the Land of the Dead, he discovers that his relative is not his idol, the famous singer Ernesto de la Cruz, but instead the song writer, Hector. In fact, Miguel learns that when Hector tried to return to his wife and his daughter, Ernesto killed him. The famed singer remains a popular performer in the Land of the Dead while his victim, Hector, is a down and out dredge. So much for Judgment Day. I thought Catholics believe Jesus sorts all that out when you take a dirt nap. Apparently not. In the Land of the Dead, according to Pixar, assholes remain assholes and losers remain losers.

 

 

The world of the living in Coco was replete with many cultural Mexican stereotypes as in Mariachi bands with colorful sombreros, spicy food, plenty of tequila, abundant clay pottery and embroidered garments. Even Miguel's young mother was working in the shoe factory while pregnant. For all the common Mexican cultural references present in the living world of Coco, the Land of the Dead was pure fantasy. Apart from the aforementioned screw job Hector encountered in the afterlife, the presence of colorful spirit animals was a little too reminiscent of Avatar. These creatures allowed Pixar animators to employ the extended color palate, making vibrant stokes of eye candy. Too bad the Catholic religion Mexicans follow here on earth is completely wrong. I guess that's okay because Catholics can sometimes be exclusive.

On the Day of the Dead, at the border crossing from the Land of the Dead to the world of the living, Hector is repeatedly rejected by the border officials because his relatives on earth don't display his picture nor remember him. This doesn't stop Hector from trying to jump the fence anyway. This would have been a great opportunity to make one of those famous Disney trademark quips for laughs. Like Hector could have said,

"You know, that wall is not that huge."

But they steered clear of any of that. In fact, Coco was devoid of any witty humor. In one scene when a lot of action was taking place on a stage, a skeleton returns to his seat with two corn dogs and asks,

"Did I miss anything?"

"Nothing," I thought.

I won't spoil the ending of Coco for you, but I would like to recap the moral of the story. Family comes first, even if they want you to quit school and forgo your dream in favor of free labor in the family business. It's absolutely imperative to have a photo of your dead relatives in your house, or they fade away in the afterlife. I wasn't aware that technology here on earth was so connected to the World of the Dead. There is no justice after you croak. Leaving your children and wife here on earth doesn’t matter as long as you are murdered, and you write lots of letters.

I read an online article in Vogue entitled, "Why Coco Just Might Be the Most Important Film of the Year" in which the author stated,

"...at a time when the president went on to declare his candidacy by branding Mexican immigrants 'rapists' who are 'bringing drugs' and 'bringing crime' to America, necessitating his passion project of a Mexican border wall, Coco’s success is nevertheless a powerful political statement."

Hollywood is run by influential people who can set an agenda through weapons of mass media manipulation, including what is known as an "Oscar campaign." The latter was employed extensively by Harvey Weinstein whose career totals include 341 nominations and 81 wins. Exactly what is an Oscar campaign? It's well documented that the Golden Globes are awarded at least partially by bribing the Hollywood Foreign Press, which consists of 90 individual who publish articles or pictures outside the USA at least four times each year. In Hollywood, nothing of value is given away for free. Success in Tinseltown is all about clout management, that is, being perceived as the go to person for the next big project. A good publicist is a master media manipulator. There is no shortage of mutual hate between President Trump and the media, but that conflict shouldn't taint the truth less we succumb to abject propaganda.

Some may describe Coco as an "important" film, but in the end the movie has less character development than an Aesop fable, lacks any trademark Disney humor, and follows a tired theme of family and tradition all while ignoring the parts of a culture that don't fit the socially relevant message.

You'll Never Guess What's Ruining My Metrics

I delete anywhere from five to fifteen subscribers per day from my blog. If I didn't do this, I would have well over a thousand compared to the fifty I have. Why do I do this when begging for subscription is part of this new age, social media, selfie driven, narcissistic world in which we live in? Because they're all fake, that's why.

A few months ago, I noticed a spike in subscribers which immediately had me thinking that I crossed an unseen threshold in viral interest in stories about celebs, politics and diarrhea. At closer inspection, I noticed all the emails were from outlook and had odd, exorbitantly long usernames. Who would create such an encumbered email? The bogus subscribers look like this. 


Bogus Emails

No one intentionally would type "mascaraquettmuriellmo" every time they wanted to check email. I searched the internet in attempts to uncover what's going on. In a forum, I learned that this infection of fraudulent outlook emails with DNA like usernames is called "Subscription Email Spam."

Bots, computer programs that surf the web, look for blogs like mine to skew analytics such as bounce rate and session duration. They also consume my advertising budget by programmatically clicking on my ads. Apparently, they do this because someone is unhappy with something I wrote. What's puzzling is that to subscribe to most blogs you got to get past a CAPTCHA, the completely automated, public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. You know, the annoying graphics which pose a masked series of characters that a human can read, but a bot struggles with. This is a typical CAPTCHA offered by the Google subscription service, Feedburner.

Pretty straight forward. Some CAPTCHAs are more difficult to decipher. Once I was presented with this when being forced to register while buying a toaster.

No one needs toast that bad. Also, for some unknown reason I really wanted a unicorn. CAPTCHAs are annoying, but they're affective at warding off malware written by smart people who are probably fans of Star Trek. So the obvious question is how does a bot programmatically get around a CAPTCHA? The answer is: porn.

A Google search revealed that apparently some clever developer wrote software that copies the CAPTCHA image then reproduces it on a website that offers nude picture if one enters the correct sequence of characters. This allows a bot to match a string of characters to an image which then can be recalled later to circumvent the Turing test. It's hard for me to believe with all the porn on the internet that there are humans so desperate that they will bother to decode a CAPTCHA in order to gain access to even more porn. Let's face it, there's no shortage of nude people on the internet.

Back in the early 1990's when the internet became more widely accessible to the public, there wasn't a lot of information out there. The first time I searched the internet, I queried on "Abraham Lincoln" which returned four hits. Back then, there wasn't a lot of porn out there either. I recall the first time I saw a website which hosted naked pictures of humans. The web developer recorded who visited the webpage and for how long and presented a list of all the users who most frequented the site. The list was entitled, "The Internet's Horniest Geeks."

Kim 

Porn can have unintended consequences. Kim Kardashian once tried to "break the internet" with a picture of her bare ass. She presumed hordes of horny nerds, frantically downloading a picture of her bulbous butt, would crash the internet. It didn't work. The internet didn't grind to halt. I think if Kim wanted to bring down the internet, she would've had a better go of it if she sat on it.

Thanks indirectly to the most jacked up dorks among us, I've got scores of bogus subscriptions flooding my blog daily because someone is mad at me for poking fun at Stephen Hawking, Hillary Clinton or Kim Jong un. Luckily, I still remember enough web programming from my career as a computer scientist to write a script to purge suspect emails for me. I used to write software before my job was offloaded overseas to a country with marginal indoor plumbing as a cost saving measure recommended by financial bean counters. Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to prevent the circumvention of CAPTCHAs via porn. I would suspect that the solution lies somewhere in randomly changing the CAPTCHA image identification since its doubtful that the work of the bots occur in real time.

I guess in the end it comes down to the fact that one should never underestimate the elegant programming of a lonely geek.

What Did Bush Say to Obama?

Recently five former presidents gathered at Texas A&M University for a hurricane relief concert. During President Clinton’s speech, Bush leaned over to Obama and said something which cracked Obama up. Obama did his best not to chuckle, but things are generally funnier when you're not supposed to laugh. Having been raised a Catholic, I’ve been in that situation many times before.

Years ago when I was in middle school, we were discussing the Apostle Peter’s denial of Jesus after the crucifixion. My friend, Dean, looked to me and whispered,

“Jesus who?”

I immediately started smirking, then I said to Dean,

“The only Jesus I know does my car detailing.”

Dean burst out busting both of us. Sister Mary Artifact marched to the back of the room and smacked Dean on the back of the head. She sent me to stand in the front of the room in a corner with my back to the class. This wasn't a good idea. In the back, I was disruptive to only my immediate neighbors. Up in the front of the class, I had an audience. I stood up there and pretended to smoke my pencil which caused a few of my classmates to laugh. I pulled paper out the wastepaper basket which I mock read with astonishment. I discovered a small milk carton in the trashcan which I pretended to guzzle. Whenever Sister Mary wasn't looking I would turn and face the class and mouth her words as she spoke intently. When Sister Mary ventured to the back of the class to swat the closest chuckling classmate, I exclaimed,

"Biggus Dickus."

Now, if you haven't seen Monty Python's Life of Brian then stop reading and go watch it now. The scene in which Caesar, played by Michael Palin, explains to a centurion, played by John Cleese, that his friend "Biggus Dickus" had a wife named "Incontinetia Buttocks" used to make us laugh uncontrollably every time. Palin's lisp made it all that much funnier. The nuns considered the Life of Brian blasphemous so naturally we all watched the movie the first chance we got. The roman guards trying not to laugh was a familiar scenario for Catholic school kids. Most of us took a beating for laughing at some point during our Catholic education.

When Obama tried not to laugh at Bush's comments, the look on Bush's face was all too familiar to my middle school mind. As I watched the video, I came up with this list of top ten possible Bush comments that made Obama laugh.

1. Would he just die already.
   
2. Hey, Barack, pull my finger.
3. I wonder which of us use Boll & Branch sheets?
   
4. Where's Puerto Rico?
   
5. You hear Carter wants to help Trump? And to think, Larry Flynt is trying to stick it up 45’s ass.
   
6. Hillary wanted to come, but she didn’t get the email in time.
   
7. Is he introducing Harvey Weinstein?
   
8. You think Carter will make it to the end?
   
9. Beyoncé had the best video of all time
   
10. We’re all gonna get matching tats after this.

When Bush started smirking and Obama smiling, I couldn't shake the feeling that Sister Mary Artifact was going to emerge from the crowd and shuffle across the stage. She'd crack Obama in the head and send Bush to stand in the corner. Of course, in my day, Sister Mary was a thousand years old so its not likely she's still around, but you never know. Sister Mary wasn't the picture of health in 1976. She was pear shaped, and for some reason she was always coughing up phlegm. I was never molested or anything like that during my eight years of Catholic education, but I was smacked in the head more times than I care to remember.

Either way, something tells me that Bush is going to keep the laughs coming.

Hollywood Ending



Abe

When I finally got around to watching the movie, Lincoln, I was certain I was in for a spellbinding journey. Directed by Stephen Spielberg, the film garnished a best actor Oscar and Golden Globe for Daniel Day Lewis. Lewis also received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance as well as many other accolades. I enjoy movies about the past for the difficulty in weaving a compelling story in amongst historical facts.



During the tense scene depicting the vote on the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery in this country, I noted early on that the delegates from Connecticut voted against the bill. I never knew my home state was on the wrong side during this pivotal time in our country's sordid past. Growing up, my teachers always told us that all six New England states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment.

I didn't even wait to leave the theatre before I googled this earthshattering event that went against everything I was taught in grade school. I quickly discovered that all four Connecticut delegates voted in favor of ending slavery. The same reaction perplexed Congressman Joe Courtney from Connecticut, who rifled a letter to Spielberg requesting that the error be corrected.

In response screenwriter, Tony Kushner, explained that Lincoln was a historical drama, not a historical documentary, and as such many elements like conversations and ancillary characters were fictious. Apparently, Kushner erroneously believed that the vote proceeded alphabetically according to state, and Connecticut being early in the alphabet, needed to vote against the Thirteenth Amendment to create tension. The filmmakers wanted to convey the concept that the bill barely passed. Actually the voting proceeds in order of the number of delegates in each state and not alphabetically. Apparently, the historical consultants on the film were not, well, historically consulted.

It's always been okay to change historical facts for a Hollywood makeover as long as doing so yields a better story than ordinary reality. It did get me thinking about a lot of films which would have been better if the story followed a more cinematographic theme rather than the boring truth. So here are a few popular films which could have benefitted from some literary license.

The Martian

This film was widely touted as a technically accurate portrayal of space travel, but unfortunately it contained significant errors. First off, the Martian atmosphere is 1% as thick as that on earth so it's unlikely that a storm on Mars could pick up a human in a spacesuit and fling him so far that his buds can't find his hapless carcass. The storm was the basis for Mark Watney's mishap that led to his stranding. Sometimes techno geeks criticize science fiction films for esoteric anomalies like satellites orbiting in the wrong direction, the sound of explosions in space or the wrong constellations in a scene. I think you can punt on some of these things, but not on the basis for conflict in a story. The main plot elements should be grounded in real science, not science fiction. The Martian astronauts also didn't appear to be affected by the 1/3 gravity on the planet as well.
 

 

The movie could have been made more compelling if Matt was stranded on Mars with a chimpanzee named "Chim-Chim." Even though The Martian won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy, it would have been actually funny if a monkey other than Damon was in the film. A lot of Hollywood flicks include an animal for comic relief. The 1964 movie, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, included a monkey named Mona, which was adorable in her little spacesuit, complete with tiny helmet.

Chim-Chim in The Martian could have saved Matt Damon from certain death as the monkey sacrificed himself when warding off an attack of alien lizard-like predators that lay eggs in your stomach, which explode, flinging guts and blood everywhere when they hatch. You know, something never done before.
 

Gravity

This film also deviated from scientific facts, but the mishap is certainly possible, that is, a catastrophic collision and disintegration of satellites orbiting the earth bring calamity to shuttle astronauts. Space debris whips around the earth at spectacular speeds. The movie implied that the Russians fucked up somehow when they shot down a defunct satellite with a missile and caused the chain reaction, the so called Kessler syndrome, which sets the plot in motion.

Clooney's character, endlessly jabbering veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, who sounds more like a bowling buddy than a seasoned astronaut, commands his last mission as he buzzes around in a Extravehicular Mobility Unit which seems to have an endless supply of fuel. Clooney senselessly flies around like a kid on a playground even though extravehicular activity is usually not the job of the mission commander. Amusement abounds as Phaldult Sharma jumps for joy yanking his tether, as he succeeds with a repair procedure on the Hubble telescope. I'm no astronaut, but I would guess that normal operating procedures don't involve testing the fidelity of a rope in space. Clooney also almost loses a screw from the Hubble telescope. This doesn't happen either as fasteners are often mechanically attached to their panel to keep space junk out of orbit. After the cataclysmic collision, Clooney rescues Bullock, but later runs out of fuel in his mobility unit. I'll bet he wished he didn't zoom around like an ass wipe in the opening scene.  

The scene in which Saundra Bullock was attempting to communicate with some foreign dude on earth, and she hears a baby crying as well as a dog barking always disappoints me. For what seems like an exorbitant amount of time, a talented and beautiful actress is wasted by howling like a dog for no logical reason. Obviously she can't communicate with a foreigner which limits the possible dialog. Bullock's character lost her only child in a tragic playground accident, which leads me to believe she would have focused on the child crying in lieu of the barking dog.

Gravity was written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, the same guy who did the riveting film, Children of Men, my all time favorite flick. In the latter movie, the human race is inexplicably unable to conceive, and the world unravels in the absence of children. A young teenager becomes the only woman on the planet to give birth in two decades. Factions attempt to kidnap the baby as their symbol of their organization. During one dramatic scene, a rebel is pinned down by gun fire. As bullets ricochet above his head, he says,

"I was carrying the baby up the stairs. He started crying. I've forgotten what they look like. They're so beautiful. So tiny."

I thought for sure when I heard the baby cry in Gravity that Cuaron would have had Bullock's character say something similar about the beautiful sound of a child crying as heard by a mother who suffered such an unbearable loss. It would have been an appropriate nod to his other magnanimous film. Instead we got the dog barking scene. Oh, well.

When Clooney was being dragged away from Bullock only to release himself to save her, the up close and personal sacrifice made for a very dramatic scene. Problem is that there was no basis in physics as to why Clooney was being pulled away. All Bullock had to do is tug on the tether and Clooney would've drifted to her. You can't kill off a protagonist with convenient science. I would have had a monkey named "Chim-Chim" at the controls of a robotic arm, snatch Bullock from her perilous predicament. Clooney, who never got along with Chim-Chim, would've been swatted into oblivion by the same robotic appendage. The monkey gives Clooney the finger as he sails by the window.

Titanic

I liked this movie, but why did the ship have to sink? It was fun watching Cal chase Rose and Jack about the decks, popping off shots at them as they scurried about. The whole ship sinking gimmick was a bit of a distraction. In fact, with a little editing, the film could have been turned into a rom-com.
 

The ending when Rose tosses the "Heart of the Ocean" necklace into the sea never made any sense to me. After Rose finds herself a survivor on the deck of RMS Carpathia, alone in the rain and cut off from her wealthy friends and family, she gives her name as "Rose Dawson" before she discovers the jewels in Cal's coat. The ending scene includes a collage of pictures of Rose on horseback in Egypt, flying a biplane, deep sea fishing, all the things Jack would've done if he had any money. I figured Rose did all these things after she hocked Cal's coat and the diamond. I'm not sure how Rose paid for all these adventures as an uneducated woman in 1912. I would have had Rose use the money from the gem to become the first female astrophysicist instead of some bimbo bouncing around the planet. Rose says,

"A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets."

The only secret I want to know is how she weathered World War I and the Great Depression while travelling the globe on perpetual vacation.

Saving Private Ryan

This film should have followed the revisionist history movies like Inglorious Basterd and Django Unchained which fulfill our desires to rewrite history. The former movie portrayed a white guy assembling a Jewish guerrilla group who whaled on the Nazis, including scalping SS officers, and ultimately assassinate Hitler. The latter was about a black gunslinger who shot white slave owners. I think if Private Ryan was a full fledged trans soldier who was completely accepted by his army buddies in 1945, the film would have been a real groundbreaker.

Pearl Harbor

Another movie that would have been better as a comedy. Perhaps a small, ragtag group of GIs defend the entire island against the invading Japanese. There would be a wisecracking dude bro from the Bronx, an ivy leaguer from Connecticut, a rough and tough sergeant with a good heart, and two comic relief goofballs, Minnesota Bear, who wears his ball cap up turned, and Gooz who has a pet rat. The constant companion to the main protagonist, Rafe, played by Ben Affleck, is a monkey named "Chim-Chim" who seized the controls of his airplane when Rafe is knocked unconscious. Chim-Chim shoots down several Japanese zeroes before Rafe regains consciousness.

Apollo 13

The riveting true story of astronauts, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise and their ill fated trip to the moon had many tense scenes involving NASA geeks trying to figure things out with slide rulers. It was a testament to the can-do attitude of Americans that I sometimes think is lost to the millennial generation, who are always popping 5-Hour Energy every time they have to do something physical.

The story would have been more compelling if the three astronauts were accompanied by a monkey named "Chim-Chim" who saved the crew when he seized the controls and stabilized the cripple capsule. Lovell and Chim-Chim perform a difficult extravehicular activity (EVA) to repair the damaged spacecraft only to have Chim-Chim dragged away by an unseen force that only affects him. He sacrifices himself by uncoupling then casting off his tether. As he drifts away, Chim-Chim flips Lovell the bird.

Blog of One

This post marks the end of my blog. I agreed to write twice a week for a year. I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep it up, but I did. Initially, I thought I would run out of ideas after a month, but they kept rolling in. With 104 posts, over 25,000 page views and a bit over 30 subscribers, I think I can say that it was an enjoyable run. I wrote this blog to sharpen my skills as a humor writer, and now I'm tasked with completing a comedy script I've been toying for a few years now. Thank you, for the kind comments. I had a lot of support from friends and family who said things like,
"You write a blog? Where?"

Throwback of Aidan, Me
and William

"I haven't read the last three months."

"You swear too much."

"That last post was stupid."

My wife, Christine, who is often the subject of many posts along with our boys, Aidan and William, have been the editor and first line readers, respectfully. They are my closest advisors who let me know when I've gone too far and occasionally not far enough. They are all the very best of everything in my life.

I'll likely return to Blog of One in the near future after my latest project is brought to a close. It's been fun and educational. I've learned many things, but one thing is for sure.

I haven't a clue what makes people laugh.