Strays

 The bluest skies I've ever seen are in Seattle. 

Just not today. 

Or for the foreseeable future. 

Last Sunday night, while the community gathered around the iconic Space Needle in the Emerald City, shots rang out. The Bite of Seattle festival ended abruptly as two young men fired guns, nominally at each other, while thousands of attendees looked on in horror. 

As quickly as this tragedy began, it was over. Bodies lay on the ground as the crowd fled the scene. Three people ranging in age from nineteen to fifty-six years old were dead. Four more, including a toddler, were injured. Police on the scene took one of the shooters into custody while another fled. Authorities provides some good news: none of the officers on at the site fired their weapons. Who knows how many more injuries and fatalities might have resulted in more shots being fired?

Because this is the bottom line: You have to have a little something wrong in your head to imagine that you might show up at a large community gathering and "settle things" with a gun. Why would anyone choose to carry a loaded gun into a throng of people who came together to enjoy the flavors of their city? It is the kind of thing that harkens back to our wild west heritage, when gunslingers would roll into town in time for the big square dance, looking for the guy who done them wrong. 

To kill them. 

In the stories we tell and make into movies, the gunslingers are generally really good shots, and they tend to shoot up the scenery rather than innocent bystanders when they miss. The fact that both of the assailants in Seattle managed to shoot everyone but each other speaks volumes about just how ridiculous this scenario turns out in real life. Revenge is not exacted out of the death of innocent victims. 

The Bite of Seattle Festival may go on next year. With increased security and measures to keep this kind of tragedy from occurring again. But it's already too late. Like the Garlic Festival in Gilroy. Or the Pride Festival in Berlin. Or any of the hundreds of other senseless killings that take place every day. 

Whether its the guns or the people that are doing the killing, one thing remains true: If there were no guns, three people would still be alive in Seattle. 

As The World Burns

 For some time, Google has been placing a proud bit of brag at the bottom of their search page proclaiming how long they have been carbon neutral. If you look for it now, it's not there. It was removed because of  "the rapid expansion of power-hungry artificial intelligence caused Google's overall carbon emissions to surge, making it unfeasible to claim operational neutrality without making misleading claims."

Want to know how I found that out? I looked it up on Google. 

Meta, also known as The Facebook, recently kicked aside their clean energy pledge as they surged forward in their efforts to build gas-powered data centers. The agreement, known as RE100, is "a global initiative bringing together the world’s most influential businesses committed to using 100% renewable electricity in their operations." This initiative proudly names more than four hundred companies that have signed on to be a part of this program, including Apple, Microsoft, and the aforementioned Google. Facebook used to be part of that list, but not if it means they would have to give up building giant, smelly data mines. 

So, as it turns out, data seems to have overtaken climate as a concern. The ability to turn your family photos into cheap cartoon renderings of themselves is not more important than our ability to live and breathe on the earth. 

This past week I struggled with my own version of this type of schadenfreude as I read of the struggles of our first paper trillionaire. All of a sudden it seems as though he can't sell an electric dumpster fire of a truck to save his empire. Additionally, the flock of greedheads who gathered to snap up stock in his spaceship program have also given up interest. This pains me because there was a time when I would have been actively rooting for anyone who said they were going to get us all to drive electric cars and fly to outer space. Now I am happy to see him his empire disappear. 

Here I sit, waiting for the billionaire who will come along and save us all. 

No Laughing Matter

 Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. 

Depending on where you look, this quote is attributed to either Edmund Kean in 1823 or Edmund Gwenn in 1959. The one hundred thirty-six years that separate them suggests two things: First of all, British actors seem to always have just the right thing to say, and that after more than a century this sentiment rings true. 

Also true is the way that death and pain seem to run throughout our experience with comedy. Knee slapping and gut busting are just two of the ways that funny things might attack us. A comedian who is having a very successful show might describe it later by saying, "I killed tonight." Contrastingly, someone who is having a less-than-triumphant experience might say, "I died up there tonight." Or perhaps you might say they "bombed." 

This last one is intriguing to me given the convicted felon's recent appearance at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner. You may remember back in April when an attempt at an assassination attempt spoiled what was supposed to his first appearance at the annual event. You might expect that with a few extra months of prep time that maybe the former game show host would be able to work up some solid material. Maybe he might take a chance at having a little fun at his own expense?

Not to worry. The man who has been impeached twice as many times as he has attended the White House Correspondents Dinner spent most of an hour blathering on as he tends to do, poking fun at others and detailing all of the perceived injustices that have been cast upon him. He even tossed out some jabs at his own cabinet: ""I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire very delicious beef tenderloin, very special beef, and I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy is right here, personally ran over the cow in his car." Which would have been funnier if he hadn't really made a habit of scraping dead things off the road for his study and amusement. 

Another feature of the yearly fete is the presentation of awards to reporters who have covered the White House over the previous year. The adjudicated rapist continued his running "gag" about the recipient of  the Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, Kaitlin Collins. "I said Kaitlan, do you ever smile?" Trump said. "Smile. You have a nice position. You are at CNN Fake News. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile."

Crickets chirping. 

An hour of this. 

When it was all over, the Orange Worst summed up his experience. "They said, 'Would you do it next year? I said I will be back next year. If you get really, really nasty, maybe not. But we are going to be back next year."

Might I suggest taking the easy way out. 

Sum Zero

War, we have asked here before, what is it good for?

Well, if you happen to be in the business of selling arms and munitions and missile defense systems, then the answer would be "our bottom line." These would be canonically known as "war profiteers." These are the folks whose business is injure, maim and kill other human beings, preferably in large numbers so as to further the spread of an ideal. Currently that ideal comes under the heading of nuclear non-proliferation, but is often short-handed to "Democracy." 

Profits. 

Oops. How did that get in there? 

The War Pigs have recently been selling us this idea that the soldiers who have been killed in and around Iran were making a "sacrifice." Chief among these aggro voices is the Chief War Pig, Pistol Pete Hegseth who used the opportunity to memorialize those who died by saying, "Godspeed, heroes. Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve." Feel free at this moment to insert your own joke about the phrase, "stiffen our resolve."

Additionally, we were told by the convicted felon who never bothered to serve because of his made-up bone spurs, “They said, and all of them said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. They won’t have a nuclear weapon.’” Yes, Dear Leader, I am certain that is exactly what they all said. In unison. As they consecrated the oath of obedience. 

You may not have heard about the three billion dollar federal and Pentagon investments made to 1789 Capital, a venture company run by the son of the convicted felon. This is separate from the two billion dollars daddy has raked in since he returned to squatting in the ruins of the White House. The families of the fallen soldiers will not see any part of that. They will, most likely, be stuck arguing with the folks at the Veterans Administration about the compensation they are due for their deceased sons and daughters. The two thousand dollars they get for burial "benefits." 

That's what war is good for.

Absolutely nothin'. 

Say it again.  

Is That Third D For Disposable?

 You may not remember the 3D movie craze. For a while there, you couldn't stumble into a theater without having to put on a pair of "special glasses" that would allow you to see the evening's entertainment without getting a headache. This, in turn, caused its own headache. Did you plunk down the extra five bucks for a chance to see Leonardo DiCaprio's Great Gatsby in 3D? Tell the truth, did you keep your "special glasses" afterward? Not out of any particular sentimental need but rather the thought that if you paid an extra five bucks those cheap black frames were going home with you. 

Then there was The Last Airbender, an M Knight Shamalamadingdong movie so bad that an extra dimension couldn't save it. This one was scheduled to be the first in a trilogy of Airbender films, but only succeeded in sending mister Shamalamadingdong to movie jail for a good long time and to give my wife and I a new euphemism for flatulence. For the purpose of transparency, I did not watch this movie any any dimension. It was a bar that I set for myself and my family for safety's sake. 

So why did Hollywood insist for about three years that all their major motion pictures needed to have this hokey bit of cheese stapled to it? Perhaps in an attempt to lure audiences back into theaters, something the powers that be did way back in the 1950s when people began to realize that they could stay at home and watch bad movies like Bwana Devil, but the only way they could have the true Bwana Devil experience was to head out to the mall, except there were no malls, and wear an even cheaper version of those cheap glasses that ushers were forced to hand out and collect after each showing. Perhaps you know someone who kept theirs seventy-some years ago?

If you do, they or their progeny might be the ones standing outside the IMAX theater in your area, waiting for their chance to have far too much visual information thrust at them for the three hours it takes to watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. There are twenty-five theaters in the United States equipped to show Mister Nolan's movie "properly." I consider myself a film buff, but not enough to make this kind of distinction. I appreciate the vision, I just don't need the extra twenty-five feet of screen to make the movie work for me. To be clear, I quite liked The Odyssey, perhaps buoyed by all the naysayers and sneering from people who haven't seen a frame of it in any format. 

But I find myself currently living in a home where my TV screen is as large as some of the ones found in cineplexes in malls, that exist now, and I don't have the same trepidation I may have once experienced when trying to decide whether or not to go out and see a movie on the somewhat bigger screen. Far away from my couch. For fifteen dollars a ticket. Until that first feature presented in Feel-Around. 

Come Here Watson, I Need You

 That sound you just heard was the ticking of the clock. My last summer vacation is coming to an end. The ramp up to the new school year has begun in little ways, such as the reorganization of the web page. Old faces will be replaced by new or returning faces. I also waded through the annual flurry of online trainings for pesticide safety, workplace harassment, and mandated reporting. I completed each one of these exercises and was rewarded with an online certificate to prove that I am ready and prepared to be an employee of the Oakland Unified School District. 

This means that I will be on the front lines to try and enforce the district's new edict that there will be not student use of cell phones during the school day. They did not come up with this all by themselves. The powers that be downtown were complying with the new state mandate that insists that students in public schools do not use their cellular devices from "bell to bell." Not in class. Not in the halls. Not at lunch. Meanwhile, these expensive gizmos must be kept in secure backpacks, lockers, or pouches. 

Teachers, parents and administrators are immune. 

Have I recently related just how sensitive fourth graders are to hypocrisy? 

Maybe now would be a good time to suggest that instead of training me on the proper use of cleaning supplies and pesticides, the district might have put together a course on how to put ketchup back into a bottle. 

For the past twenty years, I have attempted to stem the tide of cell phone use on our campus, wondering all along why eight year olds would need to have immediate access to any and all communications from other eight year olds and Al Gore's Internet. I have had to stare down a great many parents who figured they were buying these devices for their children "to keep them safe." Never mind that they are never more than ten feet from a land line and/or an adult who can contact the proper authorities in the event of an emergency. 

Like when Destry forgets his lunch and needs to order up some Door Dash. Or when there's a fight in the girls' bathroom and somebody needs to capture it for posterity on Instagram. 

I understand that I just used the words "posterity" and "Instagram" in the same sentence, and this makes me once again full of dread for the upcoming debates. Please understand that I expect that the majority of our students and caregivers will absorb this change without much fuss. This just leaves, as is the case most often, plenty of room for those fussbudgets to fill the void. 

Have I mentioned recently that I am planning this will be my last year in the classroom? 

Just Listen

There was not a lot of rock and roll to listen to on the radio when I was a mere slip of a lad.  I have very vivid memories of calling the request line at KIMN to beg them, at my older brother's insistence, to play "Yellow Submarine" one more time. KIMN was 950 on your AM dial, because what else was there? If you lived in the Denver Metro Area in the sixties, and I did, if you wanted to hear pop music, you listened to KIMN. 

Back then, the only people listening to FM radio were beatniks and hooligans of some sort. It wasn't until the mid 1970s that real rock and roll came to airwaves that I could access. There was a lot of fuzz out there on the dial, but if you twisted it all the way to the right, you would run into KBPI, and then KAZY, 105.9 and 106.7 respectively. 

If you were the safe, commercial type, you could feel comfortable listening to KBPI, who claimed to "rock the Rockies." You would get a steady diet of Bob Seger, REO Speedwagon and the occasional throwback to the Beatles and Stones. KAZY didn't have a lot of use for TV ads. They were out there on the edge of the dial, playing Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Rush. For my money, KAZY rocked a little harder than their neighbor. I liked to imagine the DJs at KBPI were probably tossing back a few beers while they were playing music for the masses. The jocks at KAZY were probably toking up during those Album Side Weekends.

No matter, for my purposes when one went to commercial, I would flip on over to the other until my needs for background music for my teenage ambitions were no longer being met. And every so often, when I was feeling the need for something more melodic or heaven help me romantic, I might spin all the way down to 103.5 for a little bit of the softer sounds of Q103. This is also where I might on occasion find Doctor Demento's show on Sunday nights, only to return to my home base of KAZY to start my week. 

And somewhere in there around the turn of the decade, my music tastes changed, or rather they expanded. I was listening to DEVO and Elvis Costello and Jimmy Buffett and Queen and all sorts of things in between. There was no format that fit my palate, so I began programming my own playlists with the aid of cassette tapes. I used this machinery to inculcate my friends and even my mother, imagining that I was providing a service that FM and AM could not. My car radio was supplanted by my cassette player. 

Somewhere in there, I got old. I started listening to a station out of Boulder, 97.3 KBCO. Their free-form programming eventually became packaged and sold across the country as "World Class Rock." When I landed in Oakland, I was surprised to discover that just across the Bay a station called KFOG had bought that package and was spreading it across Northern California. A hop skip and a jump up the dial from them was the "Modern Rock" of Live 105, KITS. Now I had my comfort music like Barenaked Ladies on one channel and scarier stuff like Jane's Addiction on the other. 

Eventually, I stopped listening to the radio. Because it was predictable. Because of commercials. Because I didn't know what I wanted anymore. 

Now, every so often, I find myself seeking out a station that I can stand for that trip across town. The one that won't make me sad. There are a lot of those.