Eliot Spitzer and The Eighth Circle of Hell

In Dante's Divine Comedy corrupt politicians and hypocrites reside in the penultimate circle of Hell, up to their necks in boiling tar for all eternity. The punishment on this mortal plain in this time is significantly less severe, although the embarrassment is almost as bad.

There's a concept that I touch upon in the last chapter of my book called "Trickle-Down Bullshit". Trickle-Down Economics couldn't work because people like to hold onto their money, but they're more than happy to pass bullshit down. People not only do things privately that they decry publicly, but -in many of the recent cases- actively work against people just like them; Spizer was brought down by the very legal mechinations that he pioneered to prosecute white-collar crime and Mark Foley was one of the most vocal congressional opponents of internet sexual predators.

I'm glad Spitzer resigned, flat out. Not because prostitution is wrong, I personally think it should be legal and, unlike the "legalize it" post I did Friday, I don't (and won't) have any personal experience to color my opinion on the subject. Not because he betrayed his wife; some couples may be tolerant of such things, but the look on her face at the press conference suggests otherwise.

No, he should have resigned because he's a hypocrite and hypocrisy up high leads to hypocrisy trickling down below. I realize that politicians and integrity go together like healthy and bacon, but the modern day political machine runs on getting worked up over issues that gets quickly forgotten when it's politically advantageous. Military service is an easy example: one of the reasons Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush were more suited to be Commander-in-Chief than Bill Clinton because they served in the military. Suddenly, when the person that isn't their guy has more military service- Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain- then they get "swift boated". With McCain this is especially heinous, the man could have been released after 6 months, but refused to use his father's considerable political power to be released any earlier than the POWs captured before him and spent an extra 5 years in the "Hanoi Hilton".

Lest you think I'm not an equal opportunity slammer, check out this speech from Bill Clinton from when John Kerry ran for president:


In fact it's kinda good that Spitzer is a Democrat, it's gives us of the more liberal persuasion a chance to walk it like we talk it. What would it make us if we didn't?

Ask Your Pal Anything!

I've had a bit of a writer's block lately; not for writing, but for blog subjects. So if you want to ask a question in ANY subject: advice, history, science, opinion, politics, ANYTHING (Actually, not math, but anything else), write me at yourpalpete@gmail.com and I will answer them in a way that'll be either insightful, informative or funny or any combination of the three. I will keep your identity secret, just keep in mind that- like Miss Cleo's phone psychics of yore- any answers are for entertainment purposes only.

Saturday Videos

A history of modern warfare told through food.



This seem like a SNL skit (and a rather tasteless one at that), but this is a honest to God sitcom.


A brief history of the sitcom.



The Hilarious Reggie Watts. absolutely NSFW


If the internet was real and had a party. This is been popular, but if you haven't seen it, it's a hoot.

One More Reason To Love The Wire

The best TV drama series ever, The Wire is showing it's last episode on Sunday. This just my opinion, but it's shared by many. It portrays a world I could never know, unless I get lost driving in Baltimore, but it still strikes a solid emotional chord. The unofficial theme of the show is "everything matters" and illustrates that point with unforgettable characters put into untenable situations exacerbated by the very systems constructed to prevent it. The show is so dense, when they started showing it on BET I wondered how they could hack 12 minutes out of it for commercials. The answer was to make it an hour and a half.

Each season expands the focus on a new element of systematic dysfunction. When I started watching, it was the beginning of last season when it was on how the education system has failed and how "No Child Left Behind" has just made it worse. This season it's been the press and from how TV critics have responded to it, it might be a little too on the nose for their comfort. The implication is that we assume as outsiders that the priority of the educational system is education, the justice system's is justice, and the press is to report the truth, but they'll prove you wrong.

The writers of The Wire had spent many years chronicling these real life failures before crafting them into the spiderweb of lives that make up the show. I've never seen an episode that wasn't excellent, but there have been plenty that have broken my heart.

Which brings me, finally, to my point. The writers of the show have written an excellent editorial for Time Magazine. If we've learned anything about ourselves is that we need to be honest with ourselves. Demonizing drug users doesn't move anything forward, it just hurts us as a society.

The War on Drugs is one of those thinks that we fight because of morality instead of practicality. As long as we try to fight it we can feel like we've done "the right thing" regardless of the fallout. And what is said fallout? 1 out of every 100 people in jail? We should be ashamed of ourselves, how much more obvious can it be that something needs to be done. And no, building more prisons is not the answer.

Legalizing drugs won't solve all the problems associated with them, in fact it'll probably create new ones. But it will move things forward. It'll clear out much of the violent crime associated with it being illegal. It'll be a pretty big strike in the War on Terror, since a lot the Taliban's funding are generated by the booming poppy trade. The medicinal applications for illegal drugs can finally be used; besides marijuana, both LSD and MDMA were making inroads as miracle drug to treat mental illness before becoming illegal.

The problem is that the scare tactics, like "Reefer Madness", still resonates with people who don't know anything about drugs. But anyone who knows ANYONE who has ever smoked pot knows that there is no kind of weed that makes you wild-eyed and crazy and hasn't been because no one's looking for it.

Frustrations-Alphabetically or in order of importance

I haven't been posting very regularly, I've been pimping the Surviving Retail Blog pretty heavy. I disconnected myself from my life to finish writing it and have not been able to reconnect since. There's part of me that would love to lay it all on the line and be bluntly honest about how I've been feeling the past, oh, year and a half but I don't think the consequences are worth it.

The creator of the funky and surreal Howard The Duck comic book died a little while ago. I liked it OK (don't confuse this with the historically awful movie), but the real impact it had on my life was that I've often adopted Howard's slogan- "Trapped in a world that he never made"- as my own. I am constantly being reminded of this fact when things happen like spending millions of dollars to make my favorite breakfast cereal crunchier in milk. Or when they release Meet The Spartans, The Hottie and The Nottie, Bar Starz and Superhero Movie, but release The Onion Movie direct to DVD. NSFW.



You know what I realized is not as easy as it might seem? EVERYTHING!

My ex-roommate Ed and I talked about the Democratic field of candidates when they were first emerging and we said the great thing about it was there was a black candidate and a female candidate where race and gender was secondary to their ideas and appeal. That was until people actually started voting, then the choice seemed to be whether you were more sexist or racist, not who you actually wanted to be President. It reminds me of the complaint that promiscuous men are called "studs" while promiscuous women are called "sluts". But in my experience, men are only called studs ironically and slut is much more of a gender-neutral insult. There might be people that think this way, but I don't know any of them personally.

When I first learned of the concept of "Intelligent Design", I thought that it was basically an acknowledgment that evolution and natural selection exist, but working through the divine. I thought, great, people are finally putting aside the ridiculous notion that the universe is a few thousand years old. But what it actually is backdoor creationism. Which brings me to Ben Stein's movie Expelled:


I will see this movie at some point, but he misses a couple of inconvenient truths in this trailer. He talks about the scientific community ostracizing people putting forth theories on Intelligent Design, but there's a good reason for this: it doesn't hold up to the scientific method, and that is kinda important to scientists. Saying "God did it" without being able to put it through the scientific method or prove it tangibly is flat out not how science works. I recognize that I could be overlooking some more scientific evidence that the movie features, but I'm going by the trailer.

Stein talks about the belief that life started, as he says, "Mud animated by lightning" like it's so much more ridiculous than God creating everything in seven days. If these scientists want to find a venue for their alternate theories of life without having to prove it scientifically there are tons of venues and groups that I'm sure would love to give them a voice, like Ben Stein for example. The problem is when ANYONE hears something that seems dumb to them, they don't take it very seriously, facts or not.

The story of creation was written in a time when we thought that the universe revolved around us literally instead of figuratively like we do now. It would have been impossible for people to handle the theory of evolution back then, look at how we're talking about it now! It's interesting that Stein says that Intelligent Design wouldn't have seemed so crazy in Galileo's time. You know whose idea's seemed crazy back then? Galileo's! Then he wasn't "The Father of Modern Science", he was an oppressed teaching the heretical idea that the Earth went around the Sun.
update: Darwin was also called crazy in his day, I forgot to mention. He kept his theory of natural selection secret from almost everyone for many years because it went so far beyond conventional (read :creationist) thinking.

These latter-day oppressed scientists may be vindicated by the same history that will vindicate George W. Bush, but I wouldn't put any money down on it.

Days of Fortified Wine and Malt Liquor

The late teens and early twenties are when you make your more "adult" type mistakes. It's your first experience with the kind of freedom that marks the rest of your life. But you also still have a lot of residual immaturity and poor impulse control of childhood, couple that with the complete inability to recognize those things and that's a recipe for disaster.

My mom told me recently, "In your early twenties, I was afraid you had a drinking problem."
I said, "Nah, I was just in my early twenties."
I was a bit more inexperienced by the time I had turned 20 than most people I knew. I had gotten puke-encrusted drunk when I was 16 and I actually heeded my day after promise to NEVER DRINK AGAIN! For a year or so. In that time all my friends got a lot better at it, but I caught up eventually.

This led to questionable decision, like drinking fortified wine; Sisco to be exact. I only drank it a few times, but those were the times when I did the things that I wouldn't take responsibility for (until I discovered Gin and Tonics). Once I bought some at a 7-11 and the guy behind me said, "Sisco? That stuff made me quit drinking." If someone said that to me now, I would probably get something else. But then:"All Right!"
Two hours later, I was trying to unhook a friend's front-hook bra with my teeth- with her consent- 20 feet from the front door at a bar that I had expected my girlfriend show up at any second.

Malt Liquor was a much more gentle mistress. Sometimes I still will drink a Mickey's to revisit my misty watercolor memories, but it vividly illustrates how much more sophisticated my palette now. Mickey's was one of the only malt liquors that didn't have some sort of "wink, wink" marketing. Colt 45 had Billy Dee-of course- but a lot of their names had parody built right in: Crazy Horse, King Cobra, Power Cylinder, Hurricane and Haffenreffer (you even say it, you sound drunk). Eventually they went too far with the menthol flavored ones, but I still gave it a try. One word review:Yikes!

It got a lot easier to buy this stuff after I turned 21 and not just because of the legality of it. I could never talk any of the people that bought beer for me to be seen buying King Cobra (my all-time favorite).

Sometimes, even now, I'll pick up a forty because it was a good ration size for staying out of trouble and it's a fantastic conversation piece. Once, at a pool party, my friend Jay and I got 40's and somebody said, "Wow, 40's!"
I said, "Yep, we're not messin' around."
A few minutes later, someone else said, "You guys aren't messin' around!"
I said, "Glad to see the word's getting out."

Awesome Parody (NSFW)

Update: I went to to store right after posting this and found a 40 of KING F'N COBRA! I bought it and it went down smooth. Or as smooth as it ever did.

One Hit Wonders Who Have Had More Than One Hit

Stardom is a funny thing, especially in the music business. Who know what catches millions of sets of ears to make a song a hit? And why is it than some people can only do it once? History is another thing, as time goes on things get remembered differently, regardless of the facts to the contrary. One of the definitions of "One Hit Wonder" is an artist who have only one hit on the Billboard top 40. This definition ends up classifying such accomplished artists as Jimi Hendrix ("All Along The Watchtower" #20) and Janis Joplin ("Me and Bobby McGee"#1) as one hit wonders. The perception of some of the most notorious one-hit wonders does not always jive with the facts.

1. Vanilla Ice- "The" Hit:"Ice Ice Baby"
I don't blame people for forgetting the amplified abortion that was "Play That Funky Music", but that doesn't change the fact that it hit #4 before he slid his way into obscurity. He got sued for sampling without crediting the song of the same name; but money aside, I'm surprised any one would want to take credit for it.

2. A Taste of Honey- "The" Hit: "Boogie Oogie Oogie"
Before it became known as the "kiss of death award", the Best New Artist Grammy was something that people took very seriously. So when A Taste Of Honey won it in 1979 over The Cars and Elvis Costello, people went nuts. But before they went gently into that obscure night they had another hit in 1981 with "Sukiyaki", that is mostly remembered by people my age is it's quoting in Doug E. Fresh's "La Di Da Di"-"It's all because of you, I'm feeling sad and blue.." Besides, if you look at the list of best new artists winnershere, you'll wonder why they were EVER taken seriously.

3. The Romantics- "The" Hit: "What I Like About You"
Its appearance in EVERY FUCKING COMMERCIAL notwithtanding, that song was actually not a hit. Two songs they released 3 years later were bigger hits with one, "Talking In Your Sleep", hitting #2. But the song was so popular that they named a 1990 greatest hits collection after it.

4. Richie Valens- "The" Hit: "La Bamba"
This was actually the B-side of his biggest hit, "Donna", eventually making it into the top 30. Valens learned the spanish lyrics phonetically, like most of the people that heard it when it became a hit in the 80's, since Richie didn't speak much Spanish.

There are more but I'm tired.

When Artistic Bankruptcy and Corporate Synergy Collide

A lot of the very nice rejection letters that I have gotten from literary agents talk about the huge amount of books that get published every year. When I see the kinds of movies and TV shows that get made these days, it makes me think I should do that kind of writing and a couple of things I've seen recently makes me think that it's only going to get worse.

Universal has struck a deal with Hasbro to make movies based on board games. Finally the excitement of Candyland in a $9 movie. Hold on, I'm not done:
Monopoly: Like There Will Be Blood with Jersey real estate and Steve and Edie. The big catchphrase will be, "I Eat Your Buffet!"
Battleship: A epic naval battle where the ships don't move at all, unless someone cheats. The catchphrase: Could it be anything else? They'll have to shoehorn it in but we'll hear "You sunk my battleship!"
Ouija: The message the board is sending is undeniable, spelling out over and over, "All of these movies are gonna SUCK!"

I saw a commercial for a new dating show that MTV is casting for a new dating show inspired BY A DORITOS FLAVOR! That's right, they were looking for "sweet and spicy" young men and women to match their new "sweet and spicy" new salty snacks.

Speaking of trashy MTV dating shows, there's a new one featuring a cast-off on the god-awful Tila Tequila show called "That's Amore". Check this out:

It's a little Night At The Roxbury, no?

It's a testament to how desperate people are to get on TV when they'll tangle with a dozen other women to catch the eye of the kind of dude they have to shake off of themselves any weekend at the eurotrash disco.

Beatles or Beatlesque?

(Commercial Message: The book that I blanked out my life to write, Surviving Retail, has it's own blog where I post excerpts from it. You can get there here)

As I have said, I love the Beatles. I was watching something on the TV on and there was a feature about popular music combo Panic At The Disco, who I have made it clear I hate. The story was about how "Beatlesque" their new songs are. I had heard their song and it was OK- although the frontdouche's mugging that he does in all their videos makes me turn the channel before I hear too much- but it didn't strike me as sounding like The Beatles.

This got me thinking about inspiration vs. influences; when musicians put up ads to gather other musicians, they say who their influences are. Then they put some of the same ingredients as their favorite bands, both the kind of instruments they use and the way the songs are structured. But the factor that is missed 99.95 percent of the time is actually being good or at least good in the same way their "influences" are. It's that spark that so many musicians chase; every guitarist can play the G and C chord, but not everyone can write "Every Rose Has It's Thorn".

Being inspired is another thing. You can take elements from what moves you to make music that tries to move the listener the same way. This is by no means a guarantee that you'll be successful at it, mind you.

So using trumpets and descending chords-like the Panic lads- might make you sound "Beatlesque", but it won't give listeners the impact that the Beatles still provide after more than 40 years.

Just ask Oasis.

I Tried Out For Last Comic Standing Today

Regardless of the egalitarian aspect shows like American Idol or Last Comic Standing approach, not everyone is truly created equal.

I went to the auditions today with the impression that everyone was going to be put under the same decision process as everyone else, but was not surprised when it wasn't.

I only have the right to say so much. Some of the people there had waited since Sunday to try out, but I got to audition a lot sooner than those people because I had answered a Craig's List ad for "Wacky People". This is a recreation of my audition Polaroid:


The people that got to wait the shortest were actual comedians, who looked at this as more of a networking opportunity than one of national exposure. I got a little intimated talking to comedians who had been working for years, I felt the impulse to stop saying, "I've only done stand up one other time 4 and a half years ago to saying, "I've been doing comedy for 4 and a half years."

The cool thing: Talking to so many cool people. I met all kinds of folks. I talked up Surviving Retail, of course and one guy said he had heard of it. I don't know if he actually had, but he definitely thought he did.

The Bad Thing: I've done a few of these cattle calls before and hopes can be dashed in an instant, but mine got dashed after about 45 seconds. I'm really proud of the song that they wouldn't let me finish, so I've posted it here: NSFW