News Must Be New

Oh my God. Michael Jackson died. A month ago.

I realize he was a megastar. I realize it was a shock for most people. (Sidenote: if I told you that Mickey Rourke or Eddie Murphy suddenly died, would you be surprised? Right. That's why I wasn't too shocked about MJ.)

But I realize that, particularly that day, it was a huge news story. But now it's not. The inability for the major news companies to let his memory and body rest in peace represents a full-time investment in tabloid journalism. A co-worker smartly said, right when it was confirmed, that this would be "Elvis all over again." And it was. I mean, it still is.

But that's all we care about. It's not the story. It's the story about the story. Any job posting for an online writer right now is really asking for a gossip columnist. Every morning show salivates to lead with a Jon & Kate or Michael Jackson's kids story.

I'm not sure when the turning point was, or perhaps it's always been this way, but there's something strange about this so-called "24-hour news cycle." For all the talk about how newspapers are dead, someone's going to have to tell me how the internet or television news cycle is any different than it used to be.

Newspapers would have one crack at their story, and it would have to be right. You'd get the paper on your doorstep, you carried the paper around with you all day, presuming that the investigative reporting in the stories was thorough and you'd believe what you read.

How is it different for online and TV? We're saturated with it for 24 hours, presumably because that's just what we were used to with the newspaper, even if there isn't anything new to report. Same story, over and over. The only difference is that the race to be first trumps the need to be right, every time.

Now it extends past the 24 hour mark, bleeding over to the next day, and the next. Just with shoddier reporting.

When Michael Jackson died, CNN covered a feed from the LA Times, which covered an unsubstantiated report from TMZ – of all places – that Michael Jackson had died. Can you blame me for not believing the story right away? TMZ would sell their own mother to the prostitution ring in Taken for twelve more hits on their homepage. They are gossip columnists, what do they care about getting a story correct?

But after the report was (miraculously) confirmed, now it's the networks' job to re-run the same story over and over. A story that might have had twists and turns in a newspaper (Watergate) was once said to "have legs." But we never knew any more about Michael Jackson's death than that he died. It went on like that for weeks.

You can't just go back on TV every day and tell me he's still dead. By definition, news must be new. But it's not. Maybe that's why we think we keep seeing shapes of Elvis in our soiled toilet paper. Or maybe that's just me.

Got the shakes

Okay, so yeah, it takes an earthquake to get me to post again. Just give me a break. I’m from the east coast and I just survived a 5.8.

The weather is beautiful out here in SoCal, but Jesus, there are a whole lot of things that can kill you. Mudslides, floods, droughts, heat waves, smog, bears, mountain lions, tsunamis, meteors (I saw it twice in one year, one summer, actually), Lindsay Lohan after 5 pm, and earthquakes. It’s really incredible. There are more potential deathtraps out here per capita than anywhere else in the US, bar none.

So my office resides on the 5th floor of a very sturdy-looking building about 30 miles west from the quake’s epicenter. People always talk about the Northridge quake out here, which I believe was a 6.7 and did a hell of a lot of damage, including 72 killed. Estimates aren’t in for this one, but there weren’t any fatalities reported as of yet. I have no idea how dozens of people aren’t killed every time one of these happens. I can see a major freeway outside my window here, and traffic went to a complete stop when it happened. Of course, that’s the logical thing to do, but what if you aren’t in a position to stop? What if it happens right when someone’s breaking right in front of you? What if the one faulty bolt supporting an I-beam is not only in your office building, but holding up a rafter right over your head?

Apparently, I slept through most of the last one that I experienced in Long Beach. I can’t imagine that one was anywhere close to this on the ole Richter scale. When your building is swaying back and forth and things are falling off of shelves like an angry poltergeist is roaming through the room, it’s disconcerting. Still more disconcerting is that it feels like time stops so God can have a tantrum. This was a minor quake compared with most others, but it still feels like the shaking isn’t going to stop. It seems to go on forever, even if it’s just 30 seconds.

If you’re at the foot of a pissed-off volcano that’s blowin’ up like a sixteen year-old girl’s Blackberry, it would suck, but maybe, just maybe, you might be able to outrun that lava/ash/falling chunk of smoldering evil. And if some jackass risks your life on the freeway because they just installed a spoiler and glass muffler on their Celica and they cut you off going 110 mph, maybe, just maybe, you can swerve out of the way in time and angrily point to your Yorkie On Board sign. And if you’re ambushed by a hungry mountain lion while hiking, maybe you’ve smoked enough pot pre-hike to make that mountain lion think you’ll taste like a cashed roach, covering your jugular vein with both hands until he leaves you alone.

But an earthquake is different. It has to be the scariest natural disaster outside of a Poseidon-style ocean liner-sized breaker. There is nowhere to go in an earthquake. They tell you to sit on the floor with your back facing a strong doorframe. Guess what? On any floor above the second, it doesn’t really matter what you do. Because if it’s really bad, you can’t leave the building in time, and if the whole thing comes down, sitting in a doorway is about as helpful as ducking and covering to dodge a nuclear blast. And say you’re outside. Okay, the entire earth is coming apart…where should I go? Quiznos?

One sidenote about a specific LA reaction to the quake: I have a friend in town staying at the Chateau Marmont, one of the biggest scenes out here. Celebrity spotting there is barely fun, it’s too easy. In any case, I just called my friend, who said he didn’t feel it at all there. In fact, he was lounging by the pool. No one else poolside felt anything either. So not only do people in LA not know what’s happening in the rest of the country, they have no idea what’s happening outside of their personal oasis, in their own city. That’s just too good.

Merging Lames

Today, I’d like to speak on a topic that is near and dear to all of our hearts: morons.

Once upon a time, mankind created the crosswalk. Apparently, too many old people and kids were getting run over by cars and buses, so a device was made that would regulate foot traffic at the same intersection as vehicle traffic. The idea was a simple one: push a button, and wait for a sign to give you a very direct order. “WALK, moron.”

Empirical evidence shows us that most people have received the WALK or DON’T WALK instructions with great clarity. But the waiting part, that’s where most pedestrians run into a lot of trouble. Granted, out here in Southern California, foot traffic is outweighed by vehicular traffic by about 7,500,000 to 1. And many crosswalks are so vast, it’s common to run into one of those two-parter crosswalks that necessitate two separate buttons and catching your breath after the first leg. So I get that a lot of people who actually do walk around here get frustrated.

But there is absolutely no excuse for these Pavlovian jackasses who jam their finger into the crosswalk button twenty times a second for a full minute before the light changes. Attention morons: just push the button once. The light will not change any faster. This has been proven.

The same goes for the elevator. This one is even easier. I’ll repeat in case the morons saw something shiny between paragraphs. Attention morons: if the elevator button is already lit up, you do not have to push the button fifty more times. We know you have places to go. We all do. That’s why we’re out and about. Otherwise, we’d be at home making tea or crepes or something. Stop pushing the button.

It’s not just that CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK that bothers me, it’s that excessive button-jamming illustrates one of the worst qualities about human beings: an embarrassing lack of patience. These are the same people who risk the lives of every other driver around them when merging traffic lanes to get exactly one car-length ahead of everyone, so that they can get home exactly one car-length sooner.

My dog will sit waiting for accidental carrot slice to drop on the floor for hours at a time. But humans pretty much suck when it comes to stopping and smelling the roses at the crosswalk. So next time you’re waiting for a light to change, just wait. Play Punchbuggy with yourself and hit yourself. Make up an advertising jingle in your head for a product you wished existed, like “Barry’s Teleportation Chamber.” Or just take a freaking deep breath. You’re outside. Just enjoy it. But for God’s sake, just push the button once.

Hannah Montana

Enough.

Us Dumb

Apparently, there’s a new theatrical release entitled “How She Move.” Before I saw the poster, I had guessed that it was a movie about dancing. But I could have been wrong. It could have been an inspirational Oscar vehicle that centered around an autistic girl (Dakota Fanning) and her adoration for her single mother (Reese Witherspoon), an international chess grandmaster.

Honestly, I don’t care what it’s about. The larger point is that we are slowly becoming a retarded society. We have the most money on the planet. All races and genders should have access to at least the most fundamental of English grammar lessons. The rule on rules has always been: You can’t break the rule until you know how to use it. I’d argue that none of us know how to read and write anymore, so we have no business calling a movie “How She Move.”

But I’m not surprised. This was brought to you by the same generation that’s learned how to compose thoughts in the realm of text messaging. There was a tween girl I overheard on the street the other day who was gossiping with her friend, and she said, “BTW, he totally has a crush on you.” But she didn’t say the words “by the way,” she sounded out the letters “Bee-Tee-Dubbowyou.”

Now, the idea of internet shorthand is to save keystrokes, I guess. But when you’re actually speaking with someone, it’s fairly counter-productive to verbalize every syllable of a letter, especially if the syllables outnumber the words. Sort of defeats the purpose of shorthand.

No wonder old people don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. They’re forced to use gadgets they never needed, read writing that’s a font size of 3 pt. on a tiny screen, and try to decode what a sentence like “ROTFLMAO!!” means. Poor old people. Do we have to confuse them so much right before they die?

I’m not sure who the cool kids were who decided that we didn’t need any standards of grammar anymore. We’ve moved way beyond convenience and speed. We’re now making up chat and text shorthand solely to confuse our parents and seem cool. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. Act like ya been there before. I can only hope that in a couple decades we’ll be looking at how we used to write to each other and be really embarrassed, like looking at a pair of bellbottoms.

Otherwise, we’re headed to Ray Bradbury “A Sound of Thunder” territory. You know, the time travel short story where the hunters go back in time to shoot dinosaurs, but screw up the entire course of human history by stepping on a butterfly? When they get back, the sign above the time travel hunting company reads: “tyme sefari inc. sefaris tu any yeer en the past. yu naim the animall. wee taek you thair. yu shoot itt.”

Seriously, at a first quick glance, does that nonsense look any more legible than the stuff you see in instant messages? Sometimes formality is a good thing. It keeps us in check, so we don’t all become a bunch of morons.

I blame Boyz II Men, they started this.

Skunks: The Cosmic Joke

I fully admit that I had no idea what the wildlife in Southern California was going to entail when I first moved out here. You really could have told me that any organism I’d ever heard of was indigenous out here and I would have believed you. Armadillos, macaws, unicorns, whatever. I’d heard that there were coyotes out here, just up the Hollywood Hills north of LA proper, that would roam down the hills at night and feast off of the garbage of the “city.” (I use quotes around the word because LA is not a real city, just an enormous suburb with a downtown area built solely because they needed somewhere to film an urban landscape.) Most of my knowledge about coyotes came to me when I was a kid, absorbing the basics, pretty much what everyone already knows: that they chase birds around the desert, walk upright, retain only a cursory knowledge of explosives, and have extensive lines of credit with ACME Products, Inc. So wild animals like coyotes roaming around LA didn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

But the more time I live here, the more I see that Southern California has just about every ecosystem you could imagine, therefore they have about every type of animal you could imagine. When you only watch movies to learn about the world, as so many Americans do, I think you assume that Southern California is lined with beaches and palm trees. Truth is, the beaches run about 200 ft. from the water, and then you’re suddenly dealing with either desert, mountains or forestry. The really great thing about Southern California are these varied environments. They have everything except polar ice caps and rainforests. Skiing, sunbathing, and driving a car through a giant hole in a tree are all about 90 minutes from each other. It’s amazing.

When I first saw skunks in my backyard, I was at first surprised, but then quickly remembered that if I wandered too far from my house I could be attacked by a mountain lion, so a skunk shouldn’t come as any great shock. For those lucky enough to get up close and personal with a skunk without getting the business end of a chemical attack, you notice right away that skunks are a fun animal to watch. I don’t think they have a very high top speed, but I guess I wouldn’t either if I wielded such power. They have a sort of jolly fat-man gait. They lumber from side to side, almost a waddle. The white stripe (nature’s very own Surgeon General Warning) makes them even more likable, like a ’66 Mustang with that double-stripe down the middle.

Basically, it’s the sort of mammal you could have a beer with. If they didn’t instill such terror in the general populous, I think we could be pretty close friends. But there’s the rub: skunks know their power. They don’t have to run fast. They can take their time eating that cat food I left out there for the stray cat. They can filter through your entire garbage container, picking and choosing exactly what they want like a take-out menu. In fact, the noises they make when they’re outside sound leisurely, like a homeless person rummaging through the recyclables on the curb looking to make a few extra bucks.

I have never seen the skunk in our backyard run away from me. If I’m lucky, it walks away. When I take Daisy the Dalmatian out there to potty in the summer, I have to crack the door and speak loudly: “Beat it, skunks. Comin’ out. Comin’ out, skunks.” On more than one occasion, I’ve had to plant my foot on Daisy’s butt to get her back inside when I see them so she doesn’t get blasted.

Even the single mother skunk who keeps returning with her two little kid skunks is fairly brazen. Like a mother perusing a tabloid magazine at the check-out line while her kids are running all over the supermarket knocking stuff over. The baby skunks would be adorable if they didn’t also carry that same attitude: “My Mom says I don’t have to be afraid of you.”

So they’ve taken over back there. Insult turned to injury when one of them detonated under the house, potentially because of a skirmish with a feline. My wife and I heard a growling down there, clearly a cat, which was then followed by a hissing sound that neither of us recognized. Ten seconds later, that unrecognizable hissing turned into an unrecognizable growling. Still, clearly not the cat. “What is that? Another cat?” “Oh my God, I think it’s a-“

BOOM. Mushroom cloud. We live in one of those old 1920’s bungalows, like a tiny cottage, and they were all heated with those wide floor vents that have at least an inch between each grate. It didn’t take long for the sarin nerve gas to reach the olfactory glands. It was like a Mission Impossible killing.

Only the most unlucky people in the world and several curious dogs that have learned the hard way already know this, but the initial spray from a skunk doesn’t smell like it does when you drive by a roadkill one. That roadkill smell has been diluted by space and time. When one of them goes DefCon 4 under your 500 sq. st. house, it’s more like immersing your head into a vat of hydrochloric acid. It burns. Burns your eyes, your nose, your throat. You cough, you gasp, you feel like you’re going to hurl. I think it took us about three months and 100 scented candles to get the smell entirely out of the air. We never did find that poor cat that decided to start shit with that vengeful skunk, maybe he was dissolved into his original atomic structure.

When a female honeybee stings you, the price for your pain and inconvenience is their own life. There’s almost a poetic nature to the attack. The honeybee is like a buzzing, crawling, literal interpretation of Hammurabi’s Code. They have only one bullet in the chamber, and not the intelligence to use it wisely. Kind of sad.

The skunk is the polar opposite, which is why they’re nature’s cosmic joke. There are no ramifications for a skunk blasting you into a nauseous stupor. They can do it over and over, and they don’t give a Gaddamn what it smells like. It probably smells good to them, like when you appreciate your own potent fart.

Skunks are a bunch of smug sons of bitches, but you have to admire them.

I Like Walking

This is going to sound like a Healthy Living! sidebar from the AARP magazine, but I honestly feel like we’d be a lot happier as people if we just walked everywhere.

Cars seemed like a good idea, but if you were to ask Karl Benz in 1896 whether he thought eventually killing 1.2 million people around the world every year was an awesome thing, he probably would say “Ja…no, zat is less zan awesome.” Actually, he would have said the rest of it in German and not a German accent. You understand.

I’ve already played the faux-Luddite in other posts. It’s older hat than the phrase “old hat,” so I won’t get into all of it again. But speaking as someone who lives on the left coast, specifically Southern California, there would be way worse things than not having cars.

In the old days, you must have actually had to interact with people on your way to wherever you were going. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have your own bubble in some ways. Listen to your own music, make your own decisions and not be at the mercy of a stalled train or psychotic bus driver, etc.

But there’s also something to be said for being thrust into other people’s space. It’s not always a bad thing to see how other people are living, for better or worse. A shared smile across the subway car has probably led to just as many marriages as stabbings. I miss getting off the subway in NY and walking to work. There was something a little more human about it.

When we’re stuck in our cars for our commutes, we turn into other people. Those people are never our better selves, they’re always our worst. We turn impatient, bossy, and even violent. We get so comfortable behind the wheel, we eventually think of the car as an extension of our bodies. Many people, including myself, take needlessly rude and even dangerous chances with the shell of this 2-ton vehicle that you should never think of taking with your own body. If we start thinking of the car as an extension of ourselves, then by default, we’re just becoming machines.

If two people were walking toward an escalator, and both got there at exactly the same time, there would often be a few seconds wasted as they requested that the other person advance to the steps first. Now switch the situation to a common highway merge, two lanes of traffic into one, and you have an all-out race to muscle your car into the wedge first, even though this would guarantee you would arrive at your destination about .2 seconds before your “opponent” in the other lane. Yes, there are nice people driving, and this sometimes translates to courteous behavior on the highways. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

Worse than the rude behavior in cars is this strange notion some rude people have after they pull an asshole move in their car that if they don’t look at you, you don’t exist. If you cut someone in line at the store, you would have to weigh the risk of having to face that person down and eventually look them in the eye, potentially enduring them dressing you down for being the rude asshole that you are. In cars, people often behave like a child, “If I don’t look at them, they don’t exist.” Similarly, you would thank that person who insisted you get on the escalator first, but in a car, the very common accepted practice of waving thanks for letting you into a lane is substituted for averting your eyes from that kind-hearted vehicle operator and feigning “keeping your eyes on the road” after you accept their waving you along.

Along the lines of dehumanizing, mankind was definitely supposed to run, walk and swim. I’m not a fitness guru, or practitioner, for that matter, but walking should make everyone feel more human. Maybe it’s how vast LA is, maybe it’s living in NY for so long and having walking be an acquired taste, but everyone should do it. And if you roll your eyes at the idea of “taking a walk,” then you’re not doing it enough.

I used to work for a studio in the valley, and during my lunchbreaks, I would take a walk for 45 minutes, then I’d be hungry for my lunch when I got back. The studio’s campus was nestled in a very residential neighborhood, and it made for a genuinely nice, long walk.

On more than five occasions, my fellow employees who drove by and recognized me walking would pull up beside me, roll down their window and ask me “What’s wrong?” I mean genuine concern. They’d ask me if my car was in the shop. I’d say no. They’d look around and ask me where I was walking. I’d say nowhere. They’d ask again if I was okay. I’d say “yeah, I just like walking.” Most of the people would just shrug and drive away at that point, but one of them actually kicked open their passenger door, chuckling as if I was telling an elaborate joke, and say “Okay. No, seriously, get in. I’ll take you back.”