Masterpiece Theatre sucked so bad I almost puked

There are few arenas left to the drab, ponderous, period meledrama.

Masterpiece Theatre is one such venue. Here we are not looking for excietment or laughs. We want a sixteen hour rendition of a Dickens classic or a brooding tragic romance set against the English Civil War. What we don't want, atleast as far as I don't want, is an insipid pirate movie done badly. That is what I had to choke down last night.

Russell Baker, to Alister Cook what beef jerky is to Filet Mignon, tried his level best to set us up with all the approriate historical background. Story takes place during the Glorious Revolution. William of Orange is sacking London and driving James II to his boy toy the King of France.
The Catholics are again in danger of being persecuted by the new Protestant king. The heroine, a bawdy, boring, lustless, little hipocrite, and her two children, a boy that says nothing, and a girl that nearly gets a man hanged just cuase shes pissed at her mom, flee the city to their stately, and really run down, country home in Cornwall. There the lady, forgetting about her husband in London and not caring much for her kids, hithces up with a pirate that is played badly by some french dickhead with long hair. I guess they wanted the Flabio look.

They go about steeling a ship because it's owner had bored the lady at a dinner party. The pirate is captured and is on the way to his justly deserved execution when at the last minute he is saved by the lady. Then both are nearly killed by some court dandy only to be saved from the dandy by the ladies husband who wants to save his wife just so she can leave him and the kids to travel the sea as a pirate. What a bunch of crap!

In the end she does not leave with her pirate bo. She heads back to her estate and lives ambigously ever after with her stuffy and affectionate husband the dandy killer of Cornwall.
What urks me about this movie was that it:

A: stunk as a pirate movie and
B: Stunk as a drama. A pox upon those that made such a skanky movie.

Furthermore I find it incredulous that PBS would allow such nonsensical bacteria to fester on there network. If I wanted to wtch crap I could just as easily turn to ABC.

I was a latino gang member

Here is a rather interesting dream:

I was at home and got a call from Donna who was visiting with you all in this dumpy apartment in on El Segunda Blvd in LA. I was puzzeld at this until I remembered that I hatd a meeting in LA. So I drove my truck down there. It took about twenty minutes of hard driving unitl I reached LA. The apartment complex was dilapidated. I met all of you and Donna plus half a dozen gang members eating taco's in this dark cinder blocked basement. I knew all of them. It was with them that I had my meeting. All night we eat taco's and refried beens from tupperware in the dark of the basement. They wanted me to drive stolen car parts down from Portland. I said okay since it didn't sound life threatening. Donna was mad that I drove all the way down to LA by myself. I informed her that she had done the same the day before. Then we were broke down on a mountain road with the stolen car parts in the bed of the truck. Then I woke up.

My brain has develeoped quite a collection of cool places from which to pick when I have dreams. I have dreams in which the same ficitous buildings are either past by or meandered through. Some dreams, especially the ones where I meander through broken buildings, are quite scary. There is one in particular that I could almost draw from memory, I have been in it so many times. Another building is a collapsed brick building in a cemetary. It is, despite it's macabre local , quite beautiful. This last dream had the basement. The basement architecture is raw cinder blocks, a dry dirty floor, low cieling with rough wood joists over head, a bare bulb in a narrow hall that runs the lenght of the building. It shares it's over all look with what I call the Burroughs buildings of another set of dreams. The Burroughs buidlings are named so because of the fact that I keep running into WIlliam Burroughs inside them. They are always in a rainy park near dusk. He is always tinkering around inside them. Sometimes we go for a drive.

Anyway last night was great because I could actually recal the dream. It' been a while since I had any dream recall. It's nice to know the ol'subcon is still cranking the yarns out. It also seems that the longer I live the more the dreams seem to be windows into a unified alter existance. The color pallet is pretty much the same for al lthe dreams. A person in a dream now may have appeared in a dream of a year ago and is still working in the same job, so to speek. When I was younger dreams had much less continuity. Now the level of continuity is unreal. There is always some part of me that knows that it is a dream. I am never totally engulfed by the spectical. But it doesn't seem to make much a a difference to me.

Just a little dream talk.

Hate crime

A guy gets kidnapped, beaten up, dragged behind a car until he dies. The culprits are caught, do to the fact that all sorts of people saw them and they were proud of what they did. They go on trial and are found, no duh, guilty and sentenced to death. This is a hate crime because the victim was black and the two white idiots didn't like the fact the guy was black. Okay so they hated him. Does it really matter what heir motivation was? They committed aggravated murder and are gonna pay. I think the the title 'hate crime' is nothing but a lame-assed attempt by lame-assed politicians to show that something is being done about racism in this country. It is a euphemism and nothing more. An idot burns a cross on your lawn, sue the hell out of them and have them arrested for vandalism and attempted arrson. We get caught up in thinking that if we just come up with the right classification for the crime then we'll send some kind of message to those that would perpetrate such crap. Well it sends no message and the idiots who think that whites are better than non-whites are still gonna be just as idiotic. The dunderheads who come up with such classifications and punishments will argue differently but they are wrong.

It's like saying that the Death Penalty will curb murder rates. Nonsense. For you and me the thought of the death penalty is pretty grim, but then again we won't be committing murder now will we. The people who commite murder, are either depressed, drunk or high, psychopathic, sociopathic, or are doing it to keep from getting murdered themselves eg the mob or gang war. The vast majority of murders in the nation are 'passion killings'. A guy gets drunk, angry, has a gun and shoots his brother in the face. Try and reason with a guy thats slammed tequilla all night long. Or take the Ted Bundy/Jeffery Dommer types these guys don't see other humans as humans, they have zero empathy, they are nuts. Reason with them? The average mob-hitman, the guy knows he's gonna 'sleep wit d'fishes' if he doesn't rub out his buddy. So, in my opinion, the death penalty has nearly zero effect as far as a deterent goes. The only people it will deter are people that arn't going to be committing the crime in the first place.

I once was opposded to the death penalty on general principal. However I am nolonger so sure of my own thoughts on the subject. I would fight to save the man's life should he wish to go to execution. To the criminal who wishes to die I would say that I wish you to live as long as science can keep you breathing. the whole thing is rather ambigious. I do not have a cwalm about removing from society a human shown to have murdered. I think the best deterent to violent crime is a loving family, and a paycheck.

Anyway back to hate-crimes. Is dragging a man to death because he is black and worse than dragging a man to death becuase you wanted to steel his car? If a person answers yes to this question then some psychological counsiling is required. We need to get our punishments down to a moderated, predicatable group. Childabuse is another big problem. There is a person in your house and you kick him unitl he is unconsious. The cops arrest you and charge you with attempted murder? No, because the person is your son and just a baby. Do you lose your custdoy rights? Oh no that would be too bad. They will put you in jail, and the child in a foster family. Then, when you get out, and show your are a good parent, you get the kid back. The problem is that you are a drunk and will do it again. I say that we need to treat all violent
crimes in a simaliar manner.

If a parrent beats a child unconsious, even once, that parent's rights are terminated and the child is put up for adoption, the records are sealed and that is that. I am not talking about child neglect, too many socio-economic reason abound for this. One of Jessica's friends was left all alone in her house for four hours, technically against the law, and her parents make 100grand a year. What I am referring to is continously giving a violent abuser chance after chance. It would be better for the child to be removed forever from that environment.

The foster system sucks too because it is, for a large extent, profit driven. The more kids you watch the more money you make. The kids are bounced around from home to home just at the time when they most need coherrent and sustained family contact. The foster system, in my
opinion, breeds socio-pathic behavior because the children are never allowed to bond with an adult. If, as a child, a human doesn't learn how to bond, the human will lose the ability to bond entirely. The foster system, I think, is a prime reason for violent crime in our nation right up there with poverty.

Life is still good though.