Classic Rant #104 (October 6, 2009): Social Networking or Social Harassment?

I have my personal trepidations about social networking sites. Although I am on a couple of them, I have my doubts about their veracity and their context in our society.

I currently belong to Facebook and Twitter, and I once frequented Delphi. I guess that they are all good for what they do—helping you to stay in touch with people you ordinarily wouldn’t hear from. I just joined Classmates.com, so I am personally networked up to the gills.

These sites are fine if you are trying to locate long-lost friends or keep up with your relationships in this fast-changing world.

However, I think a lot of people use these sites as a replacement for one-on-one social relationships, and I think that is where these sites are totally inept.

It is one thing to join these sites and post innocuous messages about yourself and the world around you.

It is another thing to post messages of hate, upload questionable photos, and/or use these sites to vent venom against humanity.

Several sick people have used these sites to put up vitriol against others, and some have even acted out their aggressions in unfavorable ways, such as the so-called Craiglist killer.

Others just post venom for venom’s sale. On Facebook, my son’s friend was taken to task for being black, and the poster used the “N” word and other derogatory epithets to blast this kid.

Thus, the main problem with these sites is that they are totally unregulated. Anybody who is a member can post whatever they want, and even if the messages are scanned, it can take days before they come down, if they come down at all.

And a lot of people misuse the sites by posting photos of themselves in various stages of dress and undress, opening themselves up to who knows what. And a lot of the people doing these dumb things are teenagers.

Look, the cat is out of the bag. No parent is going to be able to fully regulate what their child does online, but the kids should know better.

And the people who abuse these sites should also know better.

But the sites should know better, too, and provide for a safer environment for those using their services. Sure, there have been security tweaks on most of these sites, but only after something happens.

Now, being part of these sites, I am, I guess, part of the problem. These sites would go away if nobody joined, but people continue to sign up each and every day.

With their growing numbers, I just hope the people running these sites understand that their responsibility moves up a notch every time someone new joins.

But from what I’ve seen, I don’t think they want that extra responsibility.

Rant #1,451: He Is a She and She Is a He

Yes, it is time to chime into the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner situation.

You didn't think I would stay silent on these goings on for long, did you?

I held back a day or two, simply because I wanted to see what else transpired, and every day, it is getting weirder and weirder.

Bruce Jenner, Olympic hero, TV and media maven, has seemingly not been happy being a male for virtually his whole life. He achieves stardom in spite of it, marries several times, has what amounts to a basketball team of kids, and somehow finds himself part of the Khardashian clan, the most annoying people on earth.

Approaching 70 years of age, he decides it is time to morph from male to female, because he cannot reach the comfort level that he has yearned for his whole life living as a male.

So he undergoes his transformation on the national stage.

Look, we know there are people like this in the world we live in. Somehow, their genes get screwed up, they are born in the wrong sex, and some of them have psychological problems because of it, and I guess, some learn to live with it, others are tortured by it.

There were people like this before Jenner. Heck, the first such person was Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s, and if you think the current situation is causing worldwide chaos, from what I understand, Jorgensen's transformation from man to woman made the current situation pale by comparison.

Jorgensen, who just happened to be from the town in which I currently live on Long Island, was a war veteran who decided to be a guinea pig for Jenner and all who followed him/her. He was supposedly the first transsexual, lived a life as something of a celebrity until the world got bored with him/her, and died several years ago as something of a recluse.

But when you are the first of anything, you blaze the trail for others. And then we have Dr. Renee Richards.

Richards, not only a doctor but also a tennis pro, caused quite a stir when changing over from he to her. Tennis pros did not know how to classify this person, because she had been a he, and still possessed athleticism usually found in males, not females.

So would Richards compete as a male, or a female, on the pro tennis circuit?

This caused quite a stir, but that, too, died down after awhile, and Richards was able to live out her life as a female in relative solitude.

Now we come to the current case.

Bruce Jenner has decided to live out his change from male to female Caitlyn on the world stage. He has learned a lot from his association with the Khardashians, and that is that no scandal is bad scandal, and everything is fair game if you want it to be.

I personally have no problem with Jenner doing what he is doing. If that is the way he/she feels comfortable, that is fine.

However, although I am no doctor, I would say he, and Jorgensen, and Richards, and others like them, probably have some type of severe psychological problems. They all probably went through some type of therapy, and nothing could help other than going this drastic route.

My only qualms about this is that 1) Jenner is doing this on the world stage, and 2) we are now being told by the PC Police that we should think of this as "normal" activity and accept these people lock, stock and barrel in their "seamless" transition from male to female.

Sorry, I don't buy either one.

This is something that really should be a private matter, but yes, I understand that Jenner is a celebrity, has been one since his Olympic glory, and it would be very difficult to hide from the spotlight.

But I also feel that Jenner is overdoing it a bit, and the media is picking up on this as "the new sensation."

His Vanity Fair cover is just part of the media machine to almost legitimize him and others who have gone through this procedure, even though Jenner admits that he hasn't gone through the entire procedure, and has no intention of doing so.

He still likes women, and yes, he has the hardware to prove it.

That is his choice, but allowing himself to be exploited like this is supposed to make us, as a society, want to put our arms around people like this and say that "we understand," to accept them fully.

No, sorry, in my eyes it doesn't work that way.

No matter what the PC Police might have us believe, these people continue to be anomalies. Some have called them freaks. I won't do that, but I won't call them "normal," either.

To go this route to achieve maximum satisfaction out of their lives is something I don't understand, cannot understand, and to me, I can accept the choice these people make, but I cannot, and will not, list them as being "normal."

They are not.

The PC Police have even given out the proper rules and regulations and etiquette about how to greet and address such people so as not to "offend" them.

I am not so much offended by them as I am offended by the way we must treat everything with such kid gloves nowadays.

Look, whether Jenner lives out his life as a male, a female, or some combination of the two is not of my concern. Unlike ESPN, I am not giving him an award for being such a trailblazer.

And how did he dupe the women he married for so long? Did they marry his image, or him? Kris Jenner basically says she was duped. I say these women also need some type of psychological counseling themselves. Did they know of his feelings? They married him and had his kids anyway?

Sick.

But the exploitive nature of all of this, and Jenner's apparent need to be exploited, just completely turns me off.

Is he a she or is she a he or some combination?

I could care less, but a somewhat "normal" transition for these unfortunate people ... I just don't know.

Classic Rant #103 (October 5, 2009): Not a Red Letter Day For Letterman

It consistently amazes me how seemingly smart, talented people so often get entwined in things that come back to haunt them.

The most recent case in point is CBS late-night talk show host David Letterman, who outed a producer from the show “48 Hours” as the person who had launched a plot to blackmail him with information related to affairs Letterman had supposedly had with female staffers.

The talk show host made this known to a stunned audience on his show during the night of October 1.

First of all, I have to commend Letterman for coming clean to his viewers. Word would have gotten out anyway through the tabloids, and he would have looked even stupider than he does now if that happened.

And that leads me to my next point. Whether working in an office or working on the staff of a major TV show, one of the first rules is that you don’t date anyone in the office, and you certainly don’t have a sexual relationship with them. This is just common sense.

Why did Letterman stoop so low? He has had a committed relationship to the person he eventually married for a number of years now, and has a son through that relationship. Why was he hunting around for more female flesh to conquer?

And the person who was trying to blackmail him—what were his motives? We have since learned that he had a huge child support bill to pay each month, but anybody making more than $300,000 a year like he was should have been able to afford the $72,000 or so he was paying for his two kids.

Heck, making much less, I was able to afford my payments just fine.

I think there are a lot of holes in this story that need to be filled that probably won’t be, at least for us, the general public. How many women were involved? When did this take place? For how long? Did the women cooperate with the accused? Etc., etc., etc.

A couple of women have come out, but since they were all subordinates to Letterman, I would think CBS would run some type of internal investigation of these incidents. If it is proven that Letterman used his power as "the man" to seduce these women--threaten them with a loss of their job if they didn't succumb--I would think that CBS might have to take some punitive action against the talk show host.

Although I feel some compassion for Letterman, he may be a funny guy, but he has proven himself to be not a very bright one.

Oh, I know, there are people so dedicated to Letterman that they will back him no matter what he does, but once again, if it was your daughter who he painted into a corner, wouldn't your views of him change? That is the yardstick that I use, and yes, he is not the sharpest tool in the shed based on this latest episode.

I wonder when the first tell-all book about Letterman and his show will come out--and you know it will, especially since the door has now been opened with this latest escapade.

Rant #1,450: 1967

1967 was an interesting year.

It featured the so-called "Summer of Love," where, spurred on for their hatred of the Vietnam War and everything having to do with it, hippies made their major foothold on our civilization, and not only was this a social movement, but this thinking entered seemingly everything in our lives, from the clothing we wore to the foods we ate.

And it certainly entered our musical spectrum, with acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones fine tuning their musical focus to something a little more substantial than "boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl" and the like.

Then how were the Monkees, in 1967, the world's most popular rock group, outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined?

And all of this was happening when I was all of 10 years old.

1967 is the focus of my latest personal musical meandering.

If you remember last year, at about this time of year, I started my "Bubbling Under" crusade, where I attempted to collect, via MP3 file, every Billboard "Bubbling Under" tune--those tunes that never made the Hot 100, but fell in the 101 and up placement on the charts--from the years 1964-1971.

With the help of some outside forces, I was able to do just that, and now I have over 1,000 songs, many of which I didn't know existed, at my disposal to listen to whenever I want.

Now, my next musical crusade is the year 1967. Since I now have all the "Bubbling Under" hits of that year, I am now looking for every Hot 100 tune of that year.

This was a year that gave us such great songs as "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by the Monkees, "Never My Love" by the Association, and "Penny Lane" by the Beatles, but it also gave us "Wild Thing" by Senator Bobby, "I Found a Love, Part 1" by Wilson Pickett, and "You Better Sit Down Kids" by Cher--and my goal is to get every single one of them on MP3.

It also featured the advent of album-oriented rock, with the coming of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," an LP without an official single released from it during the year. It nonetheless rose to the top of the charts, and greatly impacted popular music then and to this day.

A lot of the music I am looking for I already have, which is great. I have the actual 45 they came on, so I will go directly to the source for those.

Although I would prefer to get the actual 45 recordings, I will settle for the album version of these tunes, and I have a lot of those too.

But I do not have everything, and this is where my other sources come in.

Again, this is just for me, just for me to have and listen to mainly in the car.

It is a fun thing to do, a nice side thing to everything else I do during the week, and during this upcoming summer.

It should take a few months, just like the "Bubbling Under" crusade did, and I am sure I will uncover some gems, just like I did with that pursuit, songs that I didn't even know existed.

I will certainly keep you up to date on this endeavor, on my favorite year in music, bar none.

By the end of it, I am sure I will be in something of a "Purple Haze," but on this "Ruby Tuesday," I am sure that I won't hit a "Deadend Street" and I can say "I Had a Dream," and "Oh Yeah!," I will be "Walkin' In the Sunshine" at the end of this pursuit.

"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!"

Classic Rant #102 (October 2, 2009): When I’m 64 (12 More Years)

Here is my fourth grade class picture. I hooked up with someone on Facebook who I hadn't had contact with in 40 years or so, and he was nice enough to have posted it there. I am in the upper row on the far left in this photo. Boy, was I good looking back then!

Anyway, that photo was taken over 40 years ago. Even though I belong to a number of social networking sites, most of the people in the photo have faded from my memory and I don’t know what happened to them.

Yes, it was a different world back then. Our “iPod” was a pocket transistor radio, and few of us had color televisions. Pay-TV was supposedly just starting at this point, but it wasn’t in my neighborhood in Queens, New York.

I was 10 years old when this picture was taken, and I was a pretty good student. I worked hard, and usually did fairly well in school.

Honestly, the world was beginning to change around myself and my classmates, but you really didn’t know it at that time. Even though President Kennedy was assassinated just four years earlier—and thus, we had already lost some of our innocence—you really wouldn’t know it by this picture. If the date wasn’t on the photo, it could easily have been taken in the 1950s, and not the 1960s (although some of the girls’ clothing would give the mid-1960s away).

However, just a few months after this photo was taken, all hell broke loose in our country. Race riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and a myriad of smaller, yet almost equally daunting episodes happened that helped to wash away the varnish of the 1950s and early 1960s that still encapsulated our world back then.

I look at this photo, and I see how much I have changed physically. I lost my hair, I have a couple more creases on my body that weren’t there way back when, I am a bit taller, and yes, a bit heavier.

I had a gall bladder when this picture was taken; now, I don't have one. The only problem I had with my eyes was that I was nearsighted.

I have been through a divorce, and my second marriage, I am happy to say, has been wonderful. I have two kids, one in college, and one who might go there sometime in the future.

When I was 10 years old, I could not imagine that my life would be as it is today. Could anybody in this group have imagined what they would be doing 40 years later?

The one thing that is basically the same for me is that I feel that I really am the same person that I was when I was a young kid, although I am an adult. I still laugh at the same things, have the same beliefs and the same values.

Physically, people say I look about the same as I did way back when (less the hair), and I kind of agree with them.

However, if anyone would have asked me at the age of 10 what I would be doing when I was 52, I honestly don’t think I would have gotten it right. I don’t know what I would have said, but as a starry-eyed kid, I bet I would never have projected what I am today.

Never in a million years.

Rant #1,449: "Zombeavers"

My wife worked this past Sunday, and when that happens, generally I don't have much to do.

I help her with the laundry, I go to the supermarket to pick up odds and ends that I missed when I did our major shopping, and I basically just chill out.

Usually, I chill out by launching a movie marathon, two or three movies that I watch on Netflix.

This Sunday, I watched just one--I couldn't find anything else to suit my fancy--but it was one that I have to say, I would recommend that you check out.

If you are into retro-1970s horror flicks that mix that genre with the current fascination our society seems to have with zombies, well, I have the movie for you.

The 2014 movie "Zombeavers" is just what I described: a cheesy, retro-1970s horror flick that checks in at about 74 minutes, as if it were the first bill of the double features movie theaters used to show way back when.

It concerns three young, pretty women (are there any others in this type of movie?) that go out on vacation. Little do they know that the waterway right by their accommodations has been polluted by a toxic waste spill perpetuated by two ditzy, backwoods hazmat drivers.

The toxic waste overtakes the beaver population of this waterway, and well, the rest is as predictable as you might think it is.

The women--joined by their boyfriends in what was supposed to be a boy-free time away--fight off these feisty infected beavers as much as they can, but the predictable outcome awaits them.

As these films go, there is plenty of blood, enough topless scenes to keep this 58 year old interested, and all of the action is played out by a nice looking, no name cast that appear to be having a real good time doing what they are doing.

Yes, the movie is as stupid and silly as can be, and wait until you see what is next on the agenda of the moviemakers with the mixing of zombies and the fauna in this area.

Anyway, it was a nice way to kill less than 90 minutes, and if you are into such films, I would highly recommend this movie.

I grew up in movie houses in the 1970s watching such films, and evidently, these movies--made on the cheap with basically unheard of before or since actors--have become real cult items today.

They all pushed the envelope with their nudity, sex and blood content, but for this kid of the time, they were my personal gateway to growing up. In those days, there was no Internet, no Playboy TV, just Playboy magazines and the occasional nude/sex scene in legitimate films.

So when I saw these types of movies, it really gave me a different perspective on the female of the species, and evidently, I was not alone in this view that hit me during my formative years.

Quentin Tarrantino is the ultimate purveyor of these types of films. He is also of the age of person who grew up watching these movies, and his own films are sort of homages to this genre.

So if you think that these types of films are nothing but trash, you are right to a point. They are exploitative as can be, but they shaped Tarrantino and others' thoughts about moviemaking.

Anyway, take a chance on "Zombeavers"; if nothing else, I guarantee you will laugh you socks off at this movie.

And at 74 minutes or so, it won't kill your day even if you watch it and don't like it.

The next installment of "Sharknado," anybody?

Classic Rant #101 (October 1, 2009): Roman’s Holiday May Be Over

When does the statute of limitations run out on a rape case, and does the victim actually have a say in the matter?

This issue has come to light as internationally known director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. arrest warrant related to a 1977 child sex charge.

In 1977, Polanski sexually attacked a 13-year old girl he was supposedly shooting photos of for French Vogue magazine. Once charges were filed, he fled the United States and set up residence in France, and was told that if he ever came back to the States, he would be arrested.

His victim has since settled financially with him, and in the past, she has come to terms with the episode, and has even backed Polanski on a number of occasions. She even backed him when he was up for an Oscar for the film “The Pianist,” which he directed. She said in an op-ed piece that I believe ran in the Los Angeles Times that voters (I am paraphrasing) should judge the film and not the man.

The victim, who had acting aspirations as a teenager, now lives in Hawaii and is married with a few kids. She has said that the latest episode to bring Polanski to trial is a waste of time and any measures to bring him to the U.S. should be dropped.

However, the U.S. continues to be interested in this case, and Swiss police detained him on a U.S. warrant as he was going to the Zurich Film Festival to pick up an award.

Does the victim have any say on this case? The incident happened more than 30 years ago, and Polanski has been a fugitive of justice since then. The victim settled with the director, and each has lived out their lives on separate sides of the world.

Why is the U.S. continuing to be interested in bringing Polanski to justice? Nobody will argue that what he did—essentially raping a minor after plying her with drugs—was a horrid thing. But the U.S. has not been able to touch him in more than three decades, why is it pursuing the case now?

I think it is because Polanski is one of the few well-known people in this world who has been able to basically thumb his nose at the U.S. for these many years, and has made a nice living off of these shores. The U.S. could only glare at him for the past three decades, but now, to bring some type of closure to the case, they are pursuing it.

In 1977, Polanski was supposedly going to take a plea bargain from the originally appointed judge, where he would have little or no jail time, and that was going to be the way he repaid society for what he did. However, word leaked out that another judge was going to try the case, and that judge was reportedly not going to be so forgiving, so he fled.

This is an incredibly intricate case because of Polanski’s background, which is full of excess but what preceded by much strife. He is a concentration camp survivor, and his wife, actress Sharon Tate, and his unborn child were murdered by Susan Atkins, a member of Charles Manson’s cult (see Rant #98, September 28, 2009).

In fact, Sharon Tate’s sister has said that Polanski should be let free because the act between himself and the girl was consensual! Somehow, I did not know that such an act between a grown man and a child could ever be a consensual one.

Whatever his background, I think that he should be sent back to the U.S., and when they bring him back, he should be punished, and be punished for running away like he did.

But honestly, what would be accomplished at this juncture by throwing the book at him?

The victim doesn’t want it to happen, but I think her feelings—as an adult—do not really matter. What he did to her those many years ago must be accounted for.

Give him something to do that will help make society better, such as, as part of his “sentence,” have him make a batch of public service announcements related to subjects like date rape, sexually transmitted diseases, and the like.

Also, have him work 1,000 hours of community service at a women’s center that deals with brutality against women.

Actually let him see that what he did 30-plus years ago was a horrid act, by dealing with women who have been through it all.

On the other hand, why should he be treated differently than someone who committed the same act 30-plus years ago but wasn’t a celebrity? You can certainly put up a good argument on both sides of the coin here. Maybe jail time is the way to go here. Give him a number like everyone else who has committed the same crime.

As an aside, more than 100 move business folk have come to his side, stating that he should not be arrested. Woody Allen is one of the signers of this petition.

Sometimes, you have to wonder who your friends really are. I think in this case, as far as Allen signing this petition, this is the perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think?