Despite My Suggestions, Texas Still Exists.

Is there too much lead in the water in Texas? Is that what it is? What the hell else could possible be wrong with them?

You’ve probably heard about this already, but the Texas State Board of Education gets to make “suggestions” to the publishers of school text books and since Texas is so god damn big and has so many school children, publishers basically just write their books to comply with Texas and everybody else in the country just has to deal with it.

Here are a couple of the most are you fucking kidding me? suggestions:

- Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone. Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs.

- A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.

If your stomach is amenable to bullshit, here is the article.

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Holy turritopsis nutricula!!!

So yeah, this stupid jellyfish has figured out how to NEVER DIE. That’s right. They don’t die.

Read it up and then get unreasonably pissed at these things.

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Music Videos, The Death Of?

I came across this article the other day and it made me sad.

Who Killed the Music Video Star?

Basically attempts to explain why the music video has all but died out. Part of the explanation is simple and obvious; basically MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore. Boooo MTV!

However the second part of the article is a little more interesting. The author makes the assertion that music videos were never actually an extension of an artist’s creative energy, but rather it was always a marketing tool. It was always just a publicity ploy that was trying to get you to buy the album. Since no one actually buys albums anymore, there is significantly less money flying around in the music industry and so, essentially, music videos are no longer cost effective.

How sad that the music video may be becoming a lost art form?

Since I am getting all misty-eyed about music videos, I have posted a few of my favorites below.

Radiohead/UNKLE "Rabbit in Your Headlights"
This video is creepy, cool, and every time this poor bastard gets hit by a car you really feel it. Uuugh!



Prodigy “Smack My Bitch Up”
Probably one of the greatest music videos of all time. Filthy and all Id and simply sublime. WARNING: this is the dirty version and will probably be removed by Blogspot by the time the sun comes up.



Guns N’ Roses “November Rain”
The “Phantom of the Opera” of music videos. It is simply the biggest and most actually epic of them all.



Michael Jackson “Thriller”
Arguably one of the greatest music videos of all time.

Regrettable Lies I Have Gotten Away With.

Since I can’t sleep I have been reflecting on my life and below is a(n incomplete) list of lies that I have told people THAT WERE BELIEVED!

That my family owns a bridge outside of Tracy California where my father taught me how to fish.

That I was adopted (I wrote a two-part editorial about it for my high school paper).

That I dropped out of UCLA medical school.

That I have been to Chicago.

That I would pick up the bar tab (I still feel bad about that one).

That I wasn’t drunk.

That I used to be in a band.

That I ran for mayor of my hometown when I was 19.

That I served in the merchant marines for four years.

That I am a commercial airline pilot.

That I taught myself how to tie a necktie at the age of four.

That I am Jewish.

That I am a devout Christian who is unhappy that I can’t find a church that, “Really practices what Jesus taught. You know?”

That I am gay.

That I used to know how to speak Portuguese.

That I had a short-lived and completely unsuccessful career in pornography.

That I used to own a beat up car with a lot of bumper stickers on it.

That I know how to ski.

That I have performed CPR on myself by leaning over the back of a chair.

That I used to work as a fire extinguisher inspector.

That I got such high SAT scores because they lost my test and my parents threatened to sue the SAT company.

That I had a roommate who could make fake library cards.

That my father is the actor who played the bad guy in the first “Beverly Hills Cop” movie.

That I can change the oil in a car.

That I saw a tornado once when I was in Missouri.

That I accidently swallow paper clips all the time at work.

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Singing Priest Solves Mysteries!

Am I the only one who thinks that a television show about a singing priest who solves mysteries would be homerun smash hit?

I am?

Oh.

Nevermind.

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I Can't Sleep. Because I'm a Failure.

I can’t sleep.
So here we are. Just you and me dear blog, the two of us in the middle of the night while the rest of the world is in bed, all decent and law-abiding and well-rested.

A little bit ago I was in bed and Violet was drifting off to sleep and I whispered to her that I couldn’t sleep and she said that she would tell me a story (sometimes I tell her stories when she is trying to go to sleep) and her story was this:

“Once there was a boy named Jamie and his brain was broken and so he couldn’t sleep.”

And then Violet fell asleep and I was left staring at the shadow of the ceiling fan, just ma and my broken brain.

The truth is that I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist of a psychiatrist to figure out that it started about the time I started getting rejected from grad schools. The truth of the matter dear blog is that I didn’t get in anywhere and the fact has had a pretty profound effect on me. I knew the odds going in but a part of me really did think that I would get in somewhere. Someplace. But alas, it was not too be. And I have had to spend a lot of time thinking about it lately. And that’s okay. We all need these kind of set backs from time to time but shit, I occasionally feel like my entire life is a long chain of these sort of setbacks. I mean really, how much character am I supposed to build here?

But I am not going to bitch and moan, at least not too much. I have very little interest in feeling sorry for myself. Well, except for the day I got rejected from Brown. Brown was my Ivy League wet dream and I really really really wanted to get in there. That particular day I was perfectly fine with feeling sorry for myself. But that mostly only lasted the day.

It is pretty late right now and I have always found that this is the time of the day when people either lie the most of are the most honest and so right now I will be honest. The real kicker in all this isn’t the wholesale rejection (of me) by the American creative writing establishment, it is the fact that I was soooooo looking forward to grad school because it was going to be a two year break. And I really needed the break. It was going to be two years to just write. I have never had that in my life. Almost every word that I have ever written has been written in the margins of my life. It usually meant staying up late of getting up early or writing on my lunch breaks. I was looking forward to taking all of this energy that I use to work full-time and go to school full-time and just throwing it at the writing. I wanted, for once, to be prolific. And prolific I would have been.

I coulda been a contender!

Anywho, that’s enough of that.

The reality is that I have another nine weeks of school to get through and then my life will slow to just work and life and I think that I will apply to other schools in the Fall when applications open up again. I figure that I owe it to myself to give it one more shot at this whole being educated thing. In the in between time I have a play to finish and a screenplay to finish and a novel to finish and another one to finally edit. And I have enough short work to self-publish a collection print-on-demand style. Also I’m going to have to come up with two really good pieces of writing for applications in the Fall.

I thought that my last ones were good, but apparently they weren’t good enough.

Though now that I am getting some perspective on the whole MFA Creative Writing thing I think that there is a case to be made that I don’t really write like other people and so maybe I don’t fall into the boxes that these kind of programs want a writer to fall into. Or is that just self-aggrandizing? Maybe it is but – you know – leave me the hell alone about it. I’m a failure! You really want to kick me while I’m down.

It is going to be a little while before I get totally clear of the mental wreckage and fall-out that is rejection on this massive a scale, but when I get really sad about it, I think back to a piece that I read in The Onion when I first moved to LA. It was just a little help wanted box listing the demeaning things that they made their interns do and at the bottom of the box it said, “Creative Writing MFAs need not even apply. Seriously.”

Now I am not now, nor have I ever been, one of those people who thinks that things happen for a reason. I don’t believe that there is a grand design and I don’t actually believe in destiny and if there is a god he/she had better damn well be paying attention to things far more important than me. I say all this just to make the point; don’t worry too much about me. I land on my feet faster and better than most people and I have way more experience at it than most. Also, I’m basically a specially formulated kind of awesome. So I will be fine.

And I will keep you posted.

Sorry if this entry is a little ramble-y, but I’m pretty tired.
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Terror!

So my loyal readers are always emailing me and asking, “Hey, what would happen if you let some of your fancy college-educated friends borrow that notebook that you always carry around in your pocket?”

Well the other night I let some of my fancy college-educated friends borrow my notebook and you know what they did? They drew this terrifying monster (yes, that’s a heart-shaped belt buckle that the terrifying monster is wearing).





Thanks Mike and Erin. The whole Internet thanks you.
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