Random Thought Of The Day

It’s a terrible thing to watch Nathan Barley and feel all superior to those trendy new media assholes…and then suddenly realize that you’re watching Nathan Barley and feeling all superior to those trendy new media assholes whilst simultaneously editing together clips from the Prelinger archives to make videos for spoken word pieces about monsters.

While wearing a lime-green sleeveless t-shirt with an Indian print of an elephant on it.

Jesus, turn me into a bird and let me fly away from here.

I am. I really am.

'Prisoner' actor Patrick McGoohan dies in LA – Yahoo News

LOS ANGELES – Patrick McGoohan, the Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show “The Prisoner,” has died. He was 80. McGoohan died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said. McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama “Columbo,” and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film “Braveheart.” But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in “The Prisoner,” a sci-fi tinged 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village, where a mysterious authority named Number One constantly prevents his escape.

via ‘Prisoner’ actor Patrick McGoohan dies in LA – Yahoo News.

Oakland cop shoots cuffed prone suspect…on video

I am not an anti-police sort of person. I have a couple of friends who are police and, by large, they and their colleagues do as best they can in a thankless, difficult and probably traumatizing job. I think 95% or more of policework happens within boundaries which are tolerable by society.

But then you have the stupid bastard in Oakland who murdered a kid on New Year’s in the BART station — a kid who, by all accounts, was the victim of an attack by a bunch of other guys. The dude is on the ground, he’s cuffed behind his back, he’s got his face on the pavement, there are two policemen on him — one on his neck, one on his back. He looks like he’s struggling a bit, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

Until the cop that’s on his back stands up, draws his gun, and shoots the suspect point-blank. With two different people filming him from different angles.

I can’t think of any way this is even remotely justifiable. I mean, I could have kept that guy on the ground with nothing more than a firm hand. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He was face-down. He had another cop holding him. How in the hell did anything about this situation require the use of deadly force? Particularly in the middle of a bunch of other cops? The officer holding the kid’s neck couldn’t have been more than twenty inches from where that bullet hit.

What kind of complete fucking retard psychopath shoots a cuffed, unarmed, mostly docile suspect with another cop holding him right next to your gun?

I hope they fry this fucker. Because there’s no worse misuse of power than to murder someone who not only can’t fight back, but who legally can be killed if he does try to fight back.

Celebrity trauma

My RSS feed of entertainment news is full of variations on the same headline: “John Travolta is heartbroken over son’s death, sources say”.

As opposed to…? “John Travolta dancing the fucking tarantella over son’s death”? “John Travolta staging massive party to celebrate death of child, hires Katy Perry and Perez Hilton to MC”? “Travolta’s son dies; Travolta shrugs, goes to Starbucks and orders vanilla latte”?

I don’t know John Travolta, I’ve never met John Travolta or his wife Kelly Preston or any member of his family. I don’t much care for his religious preferences, but they are no more my business than mine are his. Of course I feel very sorry for the man and his people. Losing a teenage child must be unimaginably painful. My sympathies extend, as they would to anyone I vaguely knew about whose child died.

And unlike the apparent majority of my countrymen, I’m willing to leave it at that. Because none of it is my business in any way.

Celebrity, in this country, has become a monstrous thing and our central currency. We have no more musicians or singers, we have rock stars and divas; we have no actors, we have action heroes; and many of the people who are famous now are famous for no reason at all. The fact that I know who Kim Kardashian is — despite my best attempts to keep myself out of such things — is terrible. I still don’t know why I know who she is, though I’ve seen her have sex on camera with that awful singer that Burial sampled. But she’s a bad amateur porn actress at best. (And she is bad. Trust me.)

And poor John Travolta, who’s probably out of his mind with grief right now, has to deal with the most contemptible excesses of celebrity media. I feel even worse for the guy because of it.

Please, America, go back to living your own hopeless, soulless lives, and quit sticking your nose into the soulless, hopeless lives of people you see on TV.

Fuck 2008.

I’m glad to see the last of this year. It has not been awesome for me, mostly. Hopefully 2009 will be better — for me, and you, and everybody. (If your year was awesome, well — 2009 will be awesomer.)

I’m really sad today, but I’m hopeful that I can be a better human and a more successful person in 2009. And that America will be a better place to be in. And that they release Watchmen this year, sometime.

See you around.