Is Fox still looking for pilot ideas?

One of my friends once claimed I lived a sitcom life. At the time I thought it was just commentary on the sort of goofy hi-jinks that tended to happen week by week. But looking at it from another angle, he may have been issuing a prophecy.

See, I'm a deadbeat graduate student prone to cracking bad jokes who likes cartoons and drinking too much, who's moved to England to be with my special lady, a belly-dancing polyglot who works for a major media company. My friends here include the perpetually-slightly-taken aback Londoner, the sassy gal with the northern accent, and the crazy Iranian guy who's always cooking up some new plan or scheme. Also, my next door neighbor is an ancient Chinese lady who speaks without ever using indefinite articles or conjugated verbs, and has repeatedly told me that only thing wrong with the job market here is all the foreigners.

Oh yeah, the old Chinese lady made it a point to tell the American that it was all the foreigners who are ruining the UK job market.

The first season was mostly fish-out-of-water jokes about trying to get acclimated, with lots of cheesy gags about accents and cultural misunderstandings about pants. But for the second season? Well, naturally you need to up the wackiness stakes. Which is why my special lady-friend's sister, the conservation biologist who practices Shorinji Kempo, is moving in with us.

By the way, did I mention they're identical twins? I kid you not, I live with identical twins, I date one, the other practices kicking the crap out of people. Right next door is a crazy old lady who dispenses financial and romantic advice in broken, Charlie Chan English, and I can count on regular calls from my crazy scheming friend can't go a day without breaking in some new idiom he's picked up.

Where's the Burbank kid or Jer-Dogg now that I've finally got a concept to pitch? Forget waiting for a table or being sentenced to be a butler, this is comedy gold, Jerry, it's gold!

I really ought to be working, but...

I just had to share this little nugget of trivia with you. Certain businesses can be given what's called a "Royal Warrant" from the British monarchy. This is like becoming the crown's official supplier of whatever. Take, for example, Lea & Perrins, Royal purveyors of Worcheshtershercheeshershire sauce. Or Tanqueray, royal purveyors of gin. Or my personal favorite: CH Haygarth & Sons, Gun & Rifle Makers, Gunmakers to HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

Okay, so their royal warrant to the Queen Mother expired this year, being five years after her death and all, but still, come on! The Queen Mother had an official supplier of guns and rifles. If, at some point, she wanted to shoot something or someone, she wouldn't have had to rely on a common Baretta or, heaven forfend, a German-made piece or equipment like a Heckler and Koch, oh no. She had access to custom made rifles and guns. Did the Queen Mum want to pick off targets from a distance? Was she interested in range or target shooting? Or did she just want something concealable to keep in her purse with a maximum stopping power to weight ratio for her own sense of security? Either way, CH Haygarth and Sons had her covered, so she could keep you covered.

Man, royalty is a hoot!

Okay. Back to work. Honest. No more procrastination. Gotta get this paper done...

Don't think I don't love you...

I've just been a bit busy lately. That phoney-baloney degree I was taking is almost through, so there's a couple of thousand words I need to get written. And then there's the other editing/re-writing/layout thing I agreed to do which also needs doing.

Which is to say nothing of all that beer that's not going to drink itself, you know.

But since I figure I ought to make some gesture towards your amusement, why don't you try a little of Rose & Camelia. While the game is simple enough, the introduction is worth a look just for the phrase "Such is the genteel art of face-slapping, passed down from antiquity through generations of blueblood women."

Talk to you later, eh?

Generation gap? Try Snake River Canyon-style crevasse...

Somehow, while I've been grappling with the difficulties of writing like a guy from 1870, my Dad (who has witnessed the ages of Jet, Space, Atomic, Information (both e- and i-) and Aquarius) has somehow become a Skype-using, Blackberry-owning, mobile-SMS-text-emailer.

Seriously, while I was trying (unsuccessfully) to work out whether it was more appropriate for a Victorian dude to say "Japanner" or "Nipponese", my dad was accurately using neologisms like "RU" and "O&O" and "STFU, my lamerz son, B4 you get pwned!"

Okay, maybe the last one was a joke, but not by much. Seriously, what the hell happened to me?

I don't know who to hate more...

Redbook magazine? Can't say as I know know much about it. I think the last time I saw a copy was in the dentist's office. Faith Hill? Is she the one who sings country or the one who sings western?
But if this story about how her photo was overhauled for the cover is true, I've only got one thing to say both Redbook and Faith:

Fuck you.

Indefensible stupidity

Okay, I said that I was going to get to that state of Washington thing later. Well, it's later now. The case I found was Andersen v. King County, which seemed to reverse an earlier ruling that would have allowed same-sex marriages in Washington state.

Stop me if I've got this wrong, but I thought that at the state level the supreme courts are generally meant to ensure that previous rulings are in line with the constitutions of their states. If I understand this ruling, the decision to disallow same-sex marriages in Washington under the Defense Of Marriage Act was defensible for two reasons.

The first is that unless a law can be found to offer a positive protection to a discriminated-against minority, it should be subject to federal standards of equal protection. Am I too far off in thinking that means "it's okay to protect people who have been treated unfairly, but otherwise it should protect everyone equally"? But the court's ruling claimed that

"The plaintiffs have not established that they are members of a suspect class or that they have a fundamental right to marriage that includes the right to marry a person of the same sex. "

Because, you know, there's nothing at all indicating that same-sex couples in the US are treated any differently. And the reasoning here seems to be that this decision is constitutional because both men and women are equally prohibited from same-sex marriages. Shouldn't that also mean that legislating separate water fountains (or hospitals or schools) by race would be okay as long as each group was equally prohibited from using the others' facilities?

Bullshit.

The bulk of this claim seems to rest on the court's argument that the plaintiffs haven't shown that "homosexuality is immutable", that is, an unalterable part of a person's identity. Is there any other group of people who would be subject to such a ridiculous claim? I guess advances in prosthetics mean it's okay to discriminate against people missing limbs. If Michael Jackson can change his color, anyone can, so anyplace can have a whites-only policy. No Jews allowed? Of course, there's churches everywhere that are begging for converts. No women? Sex-changes!

Bullshit.

But leave that aside too, there's another claim that I find less stupid, but more unsettling:

"DOMA is constitutional because the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children's biological parents. Allowing same-sex couples to marry does not, in the legislature's view, further these purposes."

Let's just skip the arguments about biological-parent homes. Adoption, IVF, sperm donation and divorce apparently have no bearing here. That's too many points to try and argue about. But there's a much larger assumption that's got me worried.

At what point did we cede the safeguarding of the human race to any legislature? Is it honestly acceptable to claim that allowing same-sex marriages jeopardizes the future of the human race? If there is anyone who will honestly claim that people will stop having babies just because same-sex couples can get married, they don't have any business trying to represent people living on earth. Anyone so vastly out of touch with human nature shouldn't be trusted with authority over humans. Anyone with so little faith in the human race doesn't deserve to represent us. And anyone so stupid as to think that anyone will give up sex because other people with a different preference are doing it and still claiming to be married shouldn't be driving, much less making or interpreting law.

There may be all sorts of personal reasons to not marry someone. But I have yet to see an ethical, logical, humane reason to prevent some adult from marrying some other adult. It's just a lot of obfuscation and fear, and it cheapens the legal and legislative processes.

In case you've forgotten...

Your government hates you.

They may be quite happy to take your money, keep you under constant surveillance, tell you what not to do, and who not to do it with1, but they still hate you.

Is there any other way to explain FEMA's behavior?

If you knew something could be dangerous, but chose to expose people to it anyway, I might call that reckless. If you knew it could be dangerous, and told people not to ask questions because that might mean you were aware of that danger but didn't want to be held responsible, I might call you spineless and amoral.

If you did all those things to people who had already lost their homes, possibly due in part to your own mismanagement or indifference, and to people who continue to suffer due to lack of funding, attention or effort on my part, well, a court might call it willful negligence.

I'd probably call you a cowardly, hateful, sack of shit.

If someone intentionally tried to keep me and my family in a box that could possibly give me cancer I'd say that was pretty fucking malicious.

The people who claim to be your government view your possible death by cancer as an inconvenience to their jobs. Your life is less important than their budget review.

Their job is to protect you, and instead they leave you to die.

They hate you.


1 - Short form, the state of Washington feels quite comfortable telling John Doe he can't marry Richard Roe. This is something else that's got me pissed off, but it'll have to wait for another post...

Two thoughts on beverages

In all honesty, I really shouldn't try to talk trash about the way British people drink tea. I don't think there's any way to succinctly explain the precise (and precious) ways in each person here will explain how they "take their tea", while still conveying the fact that they are all (A) somewhere along a wildly varying spectrum of preferred steeping times, brewing methods, additives, and consumption habits, and (B) completely convinced that they are, in fact, drinking the normal, standard cup of tea and while other ways of drinking tea could be conceived of, no one could possibly entertain notions of drinking something else and still think of it as normal.

Actually, I did receive some very good advice in Austin on speeding my acclimatization to UK life:

"You could just drink Boddingtons until you puke on your trousers."

C.F., you are a man of great insight. Thank you.

Not up to speed...

After some four years spent waist-deep in it, I can't say that I had any epiphanies about Japanese culture. It's not possible, in my opinion, to be able to claim any deep understanding of a nation without some greater depth of integration. And most people simply cannot get "inside" in such a short period of time.

Like that crap that John Howard's trying to pull in the Northern Territories with Mal Brough as his mouthpiece is exactly the kind of short-sighted, package-tourism "I understand these people" bullshit I mean. But I didn't set out here to get all pissed off about that. The point is that you can't just drop in somewhere, take a few holiday pics, and think that pronouncing "paella" with a Spanish accent is enough.

Personally, I was disabused of some notions, and ran head-long into a whole bunch of others. In total, though, I can honestly say that I did learn a few things about how (some) people live and think and react to events there.

But I was mistaken in thinking the learning curve would be any less steep for this part of England, commonalities of language be damned. Maybe my biggest obstacle in getting things straight here is my limited contact with the natives. At least when I was working in Japan I was forced to interact with the locals for the majority of each day. You have to make conversation with people for eight (or ten or twelve) hours a day for a couple of months straight, you're bound to pick up something. Besides, y'know, somebody's phone number or the flu or something. But here I just don't have that excuse. And it probably wouldn't work anyway.

"Pardon me, uh, guv-nor, but I was wondering if I could talk to you for, oh, thirty minutes or so about topics generally found of interest to a, uh, toff like yourself."
"[Heavily accented expletive deleted] off, wanker."

Anyway, this discovery is mildly frustrating. At this rate I may never get to understand the esoteric secrets of the "cuppa", much less the mindset of a country that would send colonies and armies halfway around the planet for the stuff before claiming it's "the national drink."

Surprised? You really shouldn't be anymore...