Top Perp Walks of 2015

This will be a short list.

2. Tonya Couch. I’d also like to see her son Ethan in handcuffs but as he’s still in Mexico, I’ll take the mother. She pisses me off just as much as he does. You would think that after her son got probation for killing for people while driving drunk and underage, then violating that probation, she might have him take a look in the mirror and guide him to be a more responsible person. Nah, Mother of the Year dyed his hair and took him on vacation in Puerto Vallarta instead.

What really got me about the “affluenza” defense was that the defense lawyer called it that, like he knew it was a joke. The term has a smirk built into it. If you buy into that logic, that Ethan was too privileged to know right from wrong, then that puts some responsibility on the parents because they should have taught him right versus wrong no matter how much money they had. Instead, four people are dead and Tonya is abetting the whole thing so I will not try to “see it from a mother’s perspective” or any of that nonsense; I will judge the shit out of these people. 

1. Martin Shkreli. I was one of those people doing a jig of glee when this guy did his perp walk. They didn’t get him for raising prices for Daraprim but as long as the guy goes to jail for something, that will be some satisfying Schadenfreude. Not only were his business practices corrupt but Shkreli seems like a really arrogant jackass anyway.

It’s unconscionable to raise the price of a potentially life-saving drug by 5,500 percent. Shkreli did reduce prices after public outcry but the fact that he could arbitrarily lower prices after arbitrarily raising them means that the prices are not based on any actual overhead costs but are instead based on profit. I guess he just needed the extra income to buy that $2 million Wu-Tang Clan album. Martin Shkreli is a terrible person and I hope the judge increases his sentence by 5,500 percent.

Well, that’s enough populist anger for 2015. Have a judgmental 2016!

Execute Steve Harvey

Because misreading a card at an awards show is an absolutely unforgivable crime. Sure, you might think, “Oh, it’s just a beauty pageant.” May I remind you that the name of the pageant is Miss Universe. Therefore, Steve Harvey did not just offend two women and the countries they represent. No, his crime was against the universe itself and the universe will have its justice.

We must put Steve Harvey to death as quickly as possible, by any means available, without a trial or due process of any kind. Those gleaming game show teeth and that boisterous personality will not save him. The man screwed up with Perez Hilton in the audience and I don’t have to tell you the gravitas that brings to his error. After Harvey’s corpse is safely disposed of, the extensive investigation into this massive, profoundly tragic error can begin. I recommend that the World Court take the reins.

The Colombians are right to sue the Miss Universe pageant and demand that Miss Philippines return the crown because reading a piece of paper incorrectly is one of the biggest mistakes one can make and to preserve order in our society and prevent this kind of thing from happening again, the price must be as high as possible. I don’t see how Miss Colombia can recover from this.

If you have a pang of conscience this Christmas week and do not wish for Harvey’s blood, you’re just very ignorant and not seeing the big picture. Colombia and the Philippines may very well go to war over who keeps that tiara. Do you want to see a mushroom cloud over Bogota or Manila? Do you? Because unless you support extreme sanctions, the murder of millions by nuclear fire will be on your head.

Execute Steve Harvey. It’s the price of a sane world.

My Favorite TV of 2015

When I decided awhile back to rank my favorite TV shows of 2015, I just couldn’t decide if Mad Men or The Americans was my favorite. The shows are very different and each had a very strong year and it’s just too hard to rank one above the other. So I was just going to leave number one as a tie between these two.

Then I saw Fargo. Jesus Christ, what an absolutely torrid season of television. So this will be a three-way tie for number one among The Americans, Mad Men and Fargo, with just too little daylight between each to discern. A few critics agree and I’ve seen some combination of all three at the top of a few lists.

This will not include all the TV I watched this season. There was a lot that I still enjoyed, like the finale of Parks and Recreation and the ABC Wednesday night lineup but there just isn’t much I can say about them that I haven’t before. There were some shows we started but didn’t finish, like Better Call Saul and Orange Is the New Black, so I can’t rank them. House of Cards was trashy fun but too stupid to write about. Dishonorable mentions go to Fear the Walking Dead and Scream Queens, which we turned off halfway through the first episode. So I’m just going to focus on a few shows of note.

Transparent. I think season one came out in 2015 so I’ll talk about that. It has a great performance by Jeffrey Tambor as a transgender woman just coming out. The sustained joke in this show is that as in transition as Maura is, she still has it together more than her self-involved, un-self-aware kids. This show also reminds us that Judith Light is a national treasure.

Daredevil and Jessica Jones. I’ve covered these before but I’m really enjoying the look at the uglier corners of the Marvel Universe, well portrayed by two very pretty people.

The Walking Dead. I should wait to judge the season as a whole but the beginning of season six has been uneven, with one of my favorite episodes ever, “JSS,” mixed with boring interludes in Alexandria. I hope the show takes a critical look at the plan to divert the zombies out of the quarry because even though some of the consequences were unforeseen, there’s an argument to be made that the plan made things a lot worse, and the zombies infiltrated the town anyway. Of course, that would mean the show acknowledging that Rick may not be infallible, so I won’t hold my breath.

Game of Thrones. I never thought I’d care for this show but am very glad Steve got me into it as I love the palace intrigue and scheming. The last two episodes stand out to me for a few scenes. In the penultimate episode, I loved the fight scene in Meereen, especially when eagle-eyed Jorah threw that spear from dozens of feet away (holy crap!) to kill the assassin targeting Daenerys. Less awesome was the sick, sick joke of Stannis burning his daughter for, as it turned out, no reason at all.

So many things happened in “Mother’s Mercy” that it’s hard to focus on one thing. Cersei’s naked walk of “Shame!” flabbergasted me, mostly for Lena Headey’s stunning performance as she tried to maintain a stiff upper lip and then crumbled. Oh, and also in that episode, Marcella died, Brienne avenged Renly by killing World’s Worst Father Stannis, Sansa and Theon escaped the Boltons and Jon Snow may be dead. Did I forget anything?

Fargo. The season was about the Massacre at Sioux Falls, which started when a married couple, too different for their union to survive, got in the middle of a war between two crime families and the decisions they made or failed to make, but it was about so much more that I’m still processing it. It was anchored by terrific performances by Kirstin Dunst (engrave her Emmy now), Bokeem Woodbine, Jean Smart, Ten Danson, Patrick Wilson and Jesse Plemmons.

For all the violence of the season, what affected me were the quiet scenes in the Fargo finale. A butcher shop girl quotes Camus, telling a dying mother that living when you know you’re going to die is absurd. “I don’t know who that is,” says the mother, “but I’m guessing he doesn’t have a 6-year-old girl.” Later the mother tells her father he’s a good man. “I don’t know about that but I do have good intentions,” he says. It’s amazing that this violent show could find such humanity and hope in the end.

Mad Men. The back half of season seven started a bit slow with the diversions of Diana the Waitress and Pima the Photographer, but kicked into high gear when the partners lost their battle to keep Sterling Cooper and Partners alive, in a sly subversion of all the previous times they rallied to save the firm from destruction. The whole season was full of scenes that mirrored or contrasted with previous scenes, rewarding people who had watched the whole thing.

After some thinking, I really did like Don’s ending. After sinking to his lowest point (which is saying something on this show), losing his wives and home and career, and confessing his sins to Peggy, he has a breakthrough and realizes he will always be at heart an ad man. I loved how the show suggested that in Don’s mind, even a genuine epiphany was just fodder for the Coke ad. Season seven also had the single best scene the show ever did: Peggy strutting into McCann with that provocative painting under her arm, sunglasses on her face and a cigarette in her mouth, ready to conquer. For anybody who followed the character’s growth, that payoff was almost orgasmic. So ends Mad Men, one of my favorite character studies of all time.

The Americans. WHY AREN’T YOU WATCHING THIS SHOW? It really is a shame that it has low ratings and low Emmy recognition, despite the critical praise. I don’t know if season three was better than the first two but it was probably the most disturbing. The latest installment had some splashy moments of violence, like Annelise’s corpse getting stuffed into that suitcase, the amateur tooth extraction and necklacing that South African.

But the really disturbing moments were more insidious, things the characters wouldn’t be able to shake or reconcile easily. Phillip has a slow-motion breakdown while having to seduce a teenager and remembers his own skeevy seduction training. Elizabeth kills a defenseless old woman who condemns her as evil. Martha wakes up to the fact that she betrayed her country for love and realizes that love is a lie, in that horror movie scene of Phillip pulling off his wig. And of course, Phillip and Elizabeth are in an impossible situation, debating whether to recruit Paige as a spy or lie to their own daughter. As in the first two seasons, the very last scene was stunning: As Paige confesses to the priest that her parents are spies, Reagan calls out the Soviets as “the focus of evil in the modern world” as the camera focuses on the resolute Elizabeth, leaving the wavering Phillip behind. Applause. 

Dear God ... what if it sucks?

Very few people have actually seen it. All we really have to go on is images of lightsabers, droids and Jedi types running around. Critics aren’t getting advanced screenings. We’re taking a leap of faith here:

What if Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens sucks? Not just that it gets mixed reviews and people find redeeming qualities: What if it’s just flat-out terrible and everybody hates it?

What if the climactic scene is Jar-Jar Binks and Ewoks tapdancing? What if instead of lightsabers they all use glitter cannons? What if it’s actually a documentary on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative? What if there’s a hologram of Bea Arthur from the Star Wars Holiday Special? What if there’s a scene of Leia and Han doing erotic pottery to “Unchained Melody”? What if Chewbacca talks like a normal person with a Cockney accent? What if there are prominent Apple logos on all the droids and battleships? What if the main setpiece is a 45-minute scene of the senate debating the theme for the Life Day party?

People have already sunk so much money into this, taking out home equity loans to afford their IMAX tickets. What happens when The Force Awakens is execrable and you stomp out of the theater and rip off your 3D glasses in disgust and get the nauseous feeling of your hard-earned money vanishing into a Disney-powered void of suck? And you get home and spot one of your new Star Wars T-shirts and you just start yelling and yelling at it? Yelling until you’re blue in the face because you have to take out your anger and disappointment on the closest tangible representation of the movie?

You go online and all the critics give it an F or no stars and people try to sell their tickets on Ebay but nobody will buy them because everybody has heard how bad it sucked. All your friends see it and post “SPOILER ALERT: IT SUCKED!!!1!!” on Facebook.

Then what? What do we do?  

Plays: 0

I had to buy a new laptop recently because the old one was slow enough that it became an incompetent paperweight. In migrating over my iTunes library, I somehow lost the play counts for all my music.

This annoyed me, even though I know it’s a petty complaint when you are financially OK enough to just run out and buy a laptop. I feel like I worked hard on that library and the play counts were almost like a legacy. I was always curious to see how many times I had listened to the most popular songs. I feel like I’ve lost something. Sometimes I wonder how many times I’ve played my favorite songs over a lifetime that stretches back well beyond MP3s. What records, tapes or CDs have I listened to most frequently? Is that what computers have done to me: Made it impossible to tell how much I love art unless I quantify it with a number?

For the record, the final count on the old laptop was 65 plays for “All I Want” by LCD Soundsystem. The runner-up was 64 plays for Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” The listing of my most-played songs was not necessarily my favorite songs because they tended heavily toward my running playlists so there were not a lot of ballads on there.

Now I start over at zero and my library is a virgin territory of unplayed songs. Upgrading a computer is a great equalizer. Years ago it annoyed me that I hadn’t played every song on my iPod at least once so I hit “play” and listened to every song in order. It was kind of fun, if repetitive when I had several versions of the same song play back-to-back. So now I have to do that again. It will be fun again, listening to songs I rarely hear.

Yes, I still listen to music on a plain old iPod instead of a smart phone. My iPod has 160 GB of storage, 40 of which is full. I highly prize the real estate space, which seems much higher than on smart phones, and will give up this device only when it has smoke coming out of it.

The Fog

At an office building in the Delaware Valley, two employees stare out the window at the opaque morning.

Kathy: Wow, I couldn’t see 2,000 feet in front of my face this morning because of all this fog.

Bob: I know. I had to keep slamming on my brakes every time I entered an extra thick pocket of fog. (Whispering) You know, we really shouldn’t even be open today.

Kathy (whispering): Seriously. I don’t know how they expect us to work in this visible mass consisting of cloud water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the air at or near the Earth's surface.

Bob: They should really offer fog days.

In walks Pat.

Pat: Sorry I’m late. Just … the fog.

Bob: I know, the fog.

Kathy: The fog, yeah.

Pat: Unless I have a clear, panoramic view for at least 10 miles, it’s not safe to do more than half the speed limit on the highway. Oh, Chris called out. Might be in later if it clears up.

Kathy: Really?

Pat: Well, Chris does have that medically documented phobia of water vapor.

Kathy: Of course, yes. Well, it could be worse. It could be … SNOW.

Bob: Uuuuugggghhhh.

Pat: Ohhhhhaaaah.

Kathy: Opsashas99n&FFG%3vb.

They all collapse to the floor and lie there moaning until quitting time.

Waive My Fee

The bank representative, the fourth person I have spoken to after getting disconnected from the supervisor, comes on the line. I quickly swallow the bite of my turkey sandwich.

“So where are you today? What part of the country are you calling from?”

I do not want to have the conversation he wants to have so like a skeptic giving the bare minimum of reaction to a psychic so as to remain mysterious, I give as little information as possible. “Delaware,” I deadpan.

“So what are your financial goals?”

Oh God, I don’t need a financial planner. Please let’s not start this. “Well, my goal for today is not to pay the $15 a month fee you’re charging to maintain the escrow account for my tenants’ security deposit.”

Pleasantries over, I explain my situation. He goes through various options, including changing my type of account and requiring me to maintain an extra $400 in the account to avoid fees.

“No, I won’t do that,” I tell him. “It makes no sense to come up with an extra $400 to avoid a $15 a month fee. Someone needs to waive my fee. I have multiple bank accounts, a mortgage, a home equity loan and a credit card with this bank. The bank is making untold amounts of interest on that home equity loan alone, at a high interest rate that it refuses to refinance. I do enough business with you that you do not need an extra $15 a month.”

Really, $15 a month? I’m not paying $180 a year on an account of someone else’s money that I am legally required to keep. This is insult on top of injury. I absolutely refuse to bend on this. One of the people I spoke to said I might be able to go into the branch and speak to someone and get out of paying the fee.

“If I go into the branch, it will be to close my accounts and take my business elsewhere. Someone, you or a supervisor, needs to waive my fee. Write off that $15 a month because if you don’t, you will lose all the money in my accounts.”

I know what I have in the bank is an electron-sized drop in the bucket but I think the math here is clear: You give a customer a small break in the short term to keep his business in the long term. Companies do this all the time, for goodwill if nothing else. I don't understand why this is so hard and why I have had to speak to so many people to find someone to accept this concept.  

He transfers me to someone else, who solves my problem. The fees are gone. It sounds like it was just an administrative mix-up.

I hang up and can finally attend to that sandwich but my lunch hour is mostly over.

Picky/Discerning

I don’t understand why some view picky eaters like me in a negative light. I prefer to think of myself as discerning. I won’t just shovel any old crap down my gullet.

(If this seems to come from nowhere, it’s really from the place most of my writing comes from: I read an article while I was bored and it struck a chord. And I have nothing else to write about this week, so.) 

I have definite likes and dislikes when it comes to food — sorry, not sorry — and don’t understand why that’s a negative. I am an adult and if I don’t want to eat broccoli, why should I? I’m not just being stubborn for stubbornness’ sake when I won’t go near certain foods. There is a reason for my avoidance. Like the taste and smell of green peppers makes me sick, so I avoid them.

I’m not going to eat something I can’t stand. I’m not going to make a big public display out of hating food (unless I’m trying to get a laugh) but I’ll just tactfully decline. If I’m in a social situation where I can sense that my rejection of a food will hurt the host’s feelings, I’ll suck it up, pretend to like the food, and vent later to Steve on the way home. Otherwise, I’m just not going to eat the spinach.

Yes, most of my dislikes center on vegetables. This is not ideal for health but given that at age 41 I still feel like a million bucks almost all the time, I regret nothing.

My food attitudes may come back to haunt me in our hopefully future parenthood. I’d like to eat least try to promote healthy eating. So if our kid hates vegetables, I’ll have to take one for the team and eat that broccoli, with a forced smile replacing my full-body shudder, and say, “See? Daddy eats it.” My parents will hear about this and laugh their heads off at the karma of it all.

Then, one day when I am on my deathbed, I will confess to him. “I never liked all those green vegetables. I just ate them so you would tooooooo …” (dies)

In summary, I’m the one who has to eat the food on my plate so I’m going to please myself and not other people.

A cheap, tacky Christmas

I have been looking everywhere for plug-in electric candles for our windows and have had no luck. We have a few but I need more for the additional windows. I’ve tried Target, the Christmas Tree store, the dollar store, Lowe’s, supermarkets, etc. Nowhere. I don’t want the kind that run on batteries or have LEDs. I just want cheap, old-fashioned, plastic plug-in candles.

I favor a cheap Christmas — not in terms of cheaping out on gifts for people but in terms of decorations. Since we have more land this year, we are able to decorate outside more so we went out and bought LED net lights for our bushes. They weren’t cheap. We’d like to put up more lights but don’t need to do everything in one year, considering we still have a room that is largely unfurnished and I’d rather save my money for something we’ll have all year than just one month a year.

Sometimes you don’t want LED lights that will last forever. You just want cheap strings of lights that may or may not burn out but it doesn’t matter because they were $5. If you’re using something year round, it does make sense to invest upfront in something that will last and save money in the long run. However, if it’s something you’re only going to pull out of storage once a year, it makes more sense to me that it be cheap.

I don’t need to pay $8 each, not including batteries, for fancy window candles. I’d rather spend less and if the bulb burns out, it’s like 50 cents to replace at any store. LED lights are nice but the glow is cold and sometimes I miss the warmer, cheaper strings of lights from childhood. We had specific strings of lights, long gone, that I still remember and miss. They don’t make them like that anymore.

Christmas décor also should be tacky. That’s where the Christmas Tree store can come in handy. I’ve bought stuff from there that broke immediately (that’s why it’s cheap). But if it’s stuff that doesn’t have an on/off switch, like a knickknack, it’s a good store. There’s a lot of garish stuff there and that’s Christmas to me: An explosion of red and green and blinking lights. Idolize the Victorian Christmas all you want but it’s false nostalgia because those people were basically walking around in an open sewer.

Who is Jessica Jones (of 'Jessica Jones' fame)?

The new Jessica Jones Netflix show is great! We’ve only seen a few episodes but I’m very much enjoying this darker series as sort of a complement to the gritty Daredevil. Krysten Ritter shows some of the dismissive snark I enjoyed in Don’t Trust the B in Apt. 23 and does quite well portraying a woman trying to overcome her past trauma while helping others avoid the clutches of a supervillain.

I never read many Jessica Jones stories firsthand but here is what I’ve been able to glean. The character first appeared in about 2001 in the Alias series as a former superhero who opened a detective agency. The comic retroactively inserted Jessica into early Marvel history, having her go to high school with Peter Parker and have a crush on him. She was present when Peter got bitten by the radioactive spider and in the vicinity when Matt Murdock got blinded and became Daredevil so it was fun to have her retconned into old Marvel history.

Jessica gained super strength and flight powers and had a brief career as the superhero Jewel (for a stint she was also known as Knightress). The Purple Man mind-controlled Jessica to attack Daredevil but she mistakenly went to Avengers Mansion (because most New York superhero activity happens within the same 50-block radius) and attacked the first superhero she saw wearing red, the Scarlet Witch. The Vision (who we all know is the world’s most sensitive synthezoid) defended his wife and with the help of Iron Man, beat Jessica into a coma. Ms. Marvel, who knew Jessica, rescued her and took her to the hospital. Judging by the Avengers membership, this happened in about 1979-80 in our world. Jean Grey, who about that time would have been Phoenix, helped Jessica overcome the Purple Man’s mental domination.

The Purple Man is Zebediah Killgrave, known on Jessica Jones pretty much by his real name. He’s an old Daredevil villain from the ‘60s. In the comics, he’s a Soviet spy with purple skin who gained mind control powers. This was all relatively harmless on his initial appearances but by the time of Alias, there was rape implied in his control of women. In recent issues of Daredevil, I understand that he fathered a bunch of purple children who inherited his mind-control power. With a Village of the Damned vibe, they turned on their father and mind-controlled him into walking in front of a truck. Killgrave had an older daughter, Purple Girl, a hero on the Alpha Flight title in the ‘80s. I hope they use the Purple Man name in the show because it has a creepy atmosphere, almost like a child’s boogeyman.

The relationship to Luke Cage, Power Man, is similar in the TV show and the comic. The two eventually married and had a child in the comics and have athletic sex on TV like they do in the comic. I guess that’s what happens when two super-strong people get together.

I haven’t seen how the TV show plays out but I am wondering about the character Trish Walker, the talk show host. In the comics, she is Patsy Walker, a redhead who goes back to the Marvel romance comics of the ‘40s. In the ‘60s, Marvel revived the character and she eventually became Hellcat, a hero who was briefly an Avenger and then a longtime Defender. Hellcat wore a costume that gave her enhanced athletic abilities and that seems close to Trish’s learning self-defense on the show.

I also heard the character Nuke shows up on the show. He appeared in the Born Again Daredevil story in the ‘80s. Nuke was a Vietnam vet who received super strength from the Super Soldier program. He was popping pills and mentally unstable and the Kingpin hired him to shoot up Hell’s Kitchen and draw Daredevil out of hiding.

I am enjoying Jessica Jones’ look at the more “street-level” stories of the Marvel Universe. 

The Walking Dead S6 E8: Start to Finish

Well, that half-season ended abruptly. As the cast makes its way through the zombie herd in their gross disguises, the one kid notices something offscreen. He tries to get his mother’s attention and then we cut to black. We’ll have to wait until after the holidays to find out what was happening. Steve is familiar with the Walking Dead comics and assures me it will be a game changer.

It was an intriguing end. There were a few stylistic touches I liked this episode. I liked the ending shot of the cast wandering silently among the zombies, like people at the world’s most uncomfortable party of socially awkward people. The Tiny Tim “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” was amusing.

I have to give a shout-out to Maggie, scrambling on that ladder to get on top of that platform and away from the zombies. We knew she was a badass but to do all that while pregnant was really impressive.

Elsewhere, we see people making the same mistakes once again. Glenn is wasting time with Enid. He almost got killed last time he tried to work with a basketcase who didn’t want to live and now he’s risking it again? Carol and Morgan tried to settle their philosophical differences over killing and he knocked her out with a really nasty-sounding body slam. Of course, the minute that happens, events prove Carol right as the Wolf takes Denise hostage.  

I didn’t mind Deanna all that much. She tried her best with what she had and it’s not like everyone in that world is equipped to be a badass. She reacted to her impending death with a “Well, shit,” as one does. The scene with her hunched over Judith’s crib, when for a second I thought she had turned and was attacking the baby, was a horrifying fake-out. I did like her chat with Michonne as this may inspire Michonne to be more of a leader (God knows she’s highly qualified). But if anyone on the show thinks Alexandria can survive as a community in that setting, I think they’re lying to themselves. That place is overrun. It’s all over.

The debate that the fans could have after this half-season is how much of what has happened is the fault of Rick and his followers. Yes, his scheme to herd the zombies at the quarry may have averted something even worse from happening. But from the perspective of the townspeople, they were living relatively normal lives in Alexandria until the new people showed up, and then the plan at the quarry failed, split their forces and left them vulnerable to the Wolf attack. Meanwhile, nobody saw the real threat of that tower collapsing and zombies inundating the town. The show goes to great pains to note that Rick is more competent than some of the weaker-willed people the group stumbles across, to the point where a few people have died immediately after questioning his orders. I know Rick is equipped to survive but it would be good for someone on the show to recognize that he can make mistakes.

And so we begin to wander again to the next fortified setting. The gang has holed up on a farm, in a prison and in a gated community. Where will they go next?