Organized sports brings out truly vile behavior in some people. In Pittsburgh, a T-ball coach paid one of the little tykes on his team $25 to bean another teammate in the head with a baseball. Motive: the coach didn’t want this kid, who happens to have a cognitive disability, playing on his team. Mind you, we’re talking about T-ball. Do they even keep score in T-ball? Was the coach worried his team would miss that last wild card spot in the T-ball playoffs? Fucking idiot.
I saw War of the Worlds last weekend. I liked it a lot. Seeing that tripod burst out of the street was one of the more frightening experiences I’ve had at a movie recently. WARNING: Quit reading if you don’t want to see spoilers. I also thought Spielberg’s decision not to show us the entire battle in the field by the farmhouse was brilliant. It could have been a massive CGI spectacle, but limiting our perspective somehow made it feel more authentic. But one thing about this story, in all its incarnations, bugs me. Here you have a supposedly advanced race of aliens with technology that can crush half of America’s military before supper. Before invading, you would think the aliens would have thought to get their shots. I mean, didn’t they do simulations and stuff to prepare? Did the sensors on their tripods fail to detect those pesky microbes? The ending makes the aliens seem more incompetent than menacing.

PostSecret has to be one of the most compelling on-line art experiments I’ve seen. The underlying concept is simple enough. People send in anonymous postcards with secrets written on them. Some of them are funny. Others are sad. And some are disturbing. Scrolling through these postcards has a definite frisson of voyeurism, regardless of whether they’re all genuine. It also makes me think about all the secrets we carry with us on a daily basis. Do we keep these secrets for our own selfish reasons or for the sakes of others? Perhaps the secrets we keep say as much about who we are as the things we choose to reveal.
And yes, I have one or two secrets myself. But there’s no way I’m writing any of them down on a postcard. The only way to pry my secrets out of me is through generous amounts of alcohol combined with explicit promises of carnal pleasures. I’d make a horrible spy. Get me drunk and start nibbling on my earlobe and I’d gladly reveal all kinds of national secrets. And when I ran out of actual secrets, I’d start inventing ones just to ensure the earlobe nibbling continued.

I finally figured out how to display the photos from the lake. Guess I had to upload them through MT. Here they are.:



It was hot that day, as you can probably tell from the hazy quality of the photos. I’ll try to put up some pictures of the Mill Ruins in the next week or so.

My week of slackerdom is coming to an end. The Minnesota Legislature passed a lights-on bill after agreeing to a broad outline for a new budget. What’s In: a 75-cent tax, oops, fee on cigarettes; a 4 percent increase in each of the two years for K-12 education; a repeal of the $5,000 cap on outpatient services for MinnesotaCare enrollees. What’s Out: the racino, any income tax hike, tougher restrictions on corporate tax shelters. It also looks like the Twins will have to wait until next session for approval on a plan to build a new stadium. As for me, I’m out a couple vacation days and a couple days without pay. Nothing I shouldn’t be able to handle, although others will be in a financial bind. I’m betting that workplace morale is going to be at a low ebb for a while.
I’m planning on seeing War of the Worlds tonight. I re-watched the 1953 George Pal version and I couldn’t get over how unbelievably patronizing that film is towards women. If you’re a woman in that movie, you serve the plot by either (a) screaming, (b) serving coffee and donuts to assorted soldiers and scientists, or (c) making googly eyes at the leading man. Not much opportunity for an actress to express her range. But those cobra-shaped death rays on the Martian ships are still way cool.

I was barely awake this morning when I heard news of the London bombings. My thoughts go out to my readers in the UK; I hope all is well with you and your loved ones. I suppose the only consolation we have is that the number of casualties could have been much, much worse. I’m beginning to wonder if this sort of thing is going to become a grim annual occurrence. A Western city is bombed, it’s news for a couple weeks, and then people are slowly lulled into a sense of security until the next bombing. And how long will it be until another attack on American soil? I get the sense that most Americans still see 9/11 as a fluke event. We certainly don’t have the same familiarity with terrorism that many European countries have acquired over past couple decades.