...with DiCaprio in the Ray Liotta role. But who is Jonah Hill, Paul Sorvino?



Are you nuts? Of course I'll go see it, and what better analogy to draw than bankers and organized crime? I only have one question: When did Matthew McConaughey turn into Young Harry Dean Stanton?

Labels: banksters, movies

I'm just a caregiver, not a patient, so I'm not ready to throw in the towel on my blog just yet. But Pam Spaulding has been battling health problems for quite some time and has decided that health and paying job and family life come first, so she 's quitting blogging. Pam's House Blend was one of the earliest blogs I discovered. She's done terrific work on LGBT issues and other progressive causes. I will miss her perspectives.

Pam's announcement.

Kind readers,

No doubt you've noticed that I've been AWOL for the better part of the last six to eight months. And what a truly shitty time it's been. I suppose it all started late last September when my mother went through her near-death experience. That was followed by an inexorable decline during which my sister did most of the heavy lifting. Then Mom died in December and my vacation time from work was burnt starting the work of going through all the stuff in her house. My two weeks of this barely scratched the surface, and only in the last two weeks was my sister finally able to get now-remodeled house on the market. No sooner did I begin recovering from all this than we hit mid-March, when we found out that Mr. B. has bladder cancer. Since that time, it's been a nonstop whirlwind of procedures, doctor visits, consultations with specialists, CT scans, MRIs, blood tests and ECGs. It's one thing to become familiar with oncology through one's work, when you're building data collection forms and solving site data entry problems and patients are identified by nine-digit numbers. It's quite another when you find out what your own spouse's treatment is going to look like. It may be mildly amusing to tell your manager that "All the Visit folder stuff is being done on Monday", but when that which has been theoretical for five years becomes real in one's own life, one gets a somewhat different perspective on things.

Mr. B. has well-reputed doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute handling his case, and so far at least, the information is mostly encouraging. There will be chemotherapy followed by surgery, and it all starts on Tuesday. I will be trying to juggle working full-time during all this, so I will probably have even less time to pay attention to the Doings of the World than I have for the last six months.

What this means for the future of B@B, I don't know. This blog has kept me sane for the better part of a decade, and I'd like to put out a "Best of..." compendium next year when we hit our decaversary. We're not going anywhere for the foreseeable future, and our good blogbuddy jurassicpork will no doubt continue his yeoman work of raging against the machine. I don't always agree with everything he writes, but he's done a great job of keeping the fires burning. Tata and Bob also have the keys to the kingdom, as does Melina. They will possibly pop in from time to time. As for me, I'll also pop in from time to time, but I'm also planning to do some journalling about what's going on, to keep family and friends informed. It won't be here, it will be in a private blog somewhere; I haven't decided where yet. If you are interested in following along, please drop me an e-mail. I can't say I'll give access to everyone, but even if you aren't given access, just know that I appreciate your readership more than you can ever know, and I hope that when we emerge from Cancer Alley, you'll still be with us.

Labels: blogging, cancer, personal musings

     I've long held that listening to the self-censoring corporate mainstream media and Obama's smiling fascist government is like trying to follow a novel with all the consonants and half the punctuation missing. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's like trying to grope one's way toward the denouement of an espionage thriller using a Mad Libs book. Insert any noun, verb, adverb or adjective of your choice and your story is as good and as accurate as the next guy's.
     And libs are indeed going slowly mad over this NSA wiretapping scandal that should come as no surprise to anyone that cheered on Bush and the USA PATRIOT Act, such as Edward Snowden's Boswell, the self-serving, hypocritical, Cato-loving tool Glenn Greenwald, hereafter referred to as "the other John Aravosis." They're torn between throwing under their short buses the President they've been inexplicably cheering on since 2008 and actually siding with Rand Paul and the Teabaggers who are raising some serious questions as to the surveillance state we've been living under since the tip of that first plane's nose touched the World Trade Center's north tower. There's a slowly growing but a growing consensus nonetheless that perhaps Snowden's motives are not pure, that perhaps he was lying about the NSA and local cops visiting his girlfriend at their house in Hawaii from which they'd apparently vacated last May 1st when the owner wanted to sell. Now we're hearing revelations that he's been in touch with Chinese authorities and informing them of tens of thousands of ongoing hacks we've been aiming at that regime, as if it's a huge surprise to them we're doing unto them what they've been doing unto us for decades.
     So, yes, let us cease to seriously listen to the utterly worthless corporate mainstream media and our equally utterly worthless corporate government that lies to us hundreds if not thousands of times daily but let us also distrust tools such as Glenn Greenwald, who'd become almost as infamous and notorious this past week as Snowden himself. Greenwald, though he may have pretensions as a serious journalist that's further egged on by paying gigs at Salon.com and the Guardian.co.uk, has forgotten the cardinal sin of journalism: Don't become the story. When you do that, we have to endure little territorial squabbles (over a guy who has no loyalty to either) made further ridiculous and minimized on a social networking site called "Twitter" between Greenwald and the WaPo's Barton Gellman, who was allegedly first contacted by Snowden then backed out when Gellman refused to commit to a 72 hour turnaround time on the exposé (Greenwald tweets back like an irritated parakeet that no, he'd been secretly working with Snowden since last February.).
     As massive unearthed conspiracies generally do, it's become as much if not more about the leaker, his character and that of Greenwald, with the media frenzy turned like a rabid dog snapping at shadows and its own tail while completely forgetting about the central story, the one to which we all ought to be paying attention: That the government is spying on us and the Obama administration and Obama himself lying to our faces by saying we're not the targets, after all, and that this NSA warrantless wiretapping program is aimed only at non-Americans, comrades.
     That's the real story. Not him.
     Yet, if you were to do a Google search on Snowden's full name, you would find much more often than not the story is about him, this year's Bradley Manning, even though the kangaroo court presiding over Bradley Manning's trial has just convened. We just can't seem to make up our minds about Edward Snowden. The New Yorker says he's a hero. The New Yorker says he's not a hero (although anyone who seriously entertains for a nanosecond what Jeffery Toobin writes ought to be flogged with a cat-o-nine tails laced with Tabasco sauce). The erstwhile liberal rag Slate even openly asks if Snowden is a traitor while others under that same masthead straddle the fence and ask if he's a hero or a villain. In fact, the usually stuffy and conservative magazine Forbes has gone all Tiger Beat and actually tells us what Edward Snowden was like as a teeenager.
     Eyes on the prize, peeps, or what passes for a brass ring these days.
     This massive surveillance state, which again should come as no surprise to anyone who can remember back to October 26th 2001 when the USA PATRIOT Act was "ratified" after Republicans slipped into the bill in the dead of night and pulling a switcheroo after making the US Printing Office pull an allnighter language that dramatically altered the already fascist content. And no one, especially Greenwald, who openly championed the USA PATRIOT Act in books, the media, the Congressional Record or even on their blog has the right to any degree of outrage that this is happening today.
     The New York Times dropped the bombshell back on December 16, 2005 that warrantless wiretapping and the circumvention of Jimmy Carter's FISA courts had been going on since 9/11 if not before. The Bush administration then sheepishly admitted that, yeah, we were spying on just a few of you through the telephone companies that's gouging you every month in your home and cell phone bills. Then we found out it was more like tens if not hundreds of thousands. George W. Bush was even kind enough to tell us, once the shit hit the fan, exactly how the spying program worked and that he'd reauthorized through Executive Orders the same thing 45 more times.
     That Obama, a man who has quietly and infamously defended the war criminals of the Bush administration sprinted off the campaign trail to cast a vote giving telcoms retroactive immunity for spying on us, thereby putting the kibosh on almost four dozen lawsuits, should actually expand this fascist police state left to him by Bush should come as no surprise to liberals. The man, after all, openly lied to us and informed us while defending the program that this wide net shown to us by Snowden was not aimed at American citizens when that same man ordered the deaths of at least five Americans through his drone strike assassination program.
     I keep saying it until I'm blue in the face and I do not care how many times I'm ignored. But Bob Barr, former Georgia congressman, warned us that if you give government power, it will use it. The current zeitgeist is, If Obama doesn't dismantle this program now, then he will leave this invasive police state to a real tyrant. What people like Lee Camp and the Rude Pundit cannot bring themselves to admit is that Obama is that tyrant of the future.
     And if you're tempted to laugh about that, then go ahead. But while you're struggling to catch your breath and wipe your eyes, let me ask you: How long do you think you'll be able to protest the Obama administration or anything regarding the government if you were to do so before a federal building, or near someone who happens to have Secret Service protection (did you even know that Obama quietly signed the 2013 version into law less than a month ago without even being concerned about indefinitely detaining US citizens or is that still somehow less noxious than Bush's USA PATRIOT Act)? I'd give you less than 60 seconds. Maybe 30.
     You mad libs may condescendingly laugh at charges that your hero is a tyrant with one jackboot out of the closet but the first thing a tyrant thinks while getting up in the morning (aside from pissing not into a toilet but on the heads of the poor and working class) is how to suppress dissent. And this is what the Obama administration has done since Day One. Hence the National Defense Authorization Act. Hence the uninterrupted renewals of Bush's USA PATRIOT Act.
     Hence the other unavoidable fact that, by April last year, the Obama administration had gone after more whistleblowers than the previous 43 administrations combined.
     And what addlepated Teabaggers and liberals don't have the wits to ask as they worry about which side of the gridiron their shifting positions on Snowden, the NSA and Obama will land them is, "Why do we have so many whistleblowers to persecute and prosecute in the hallowed name of national security?"
     Our completely worthless AG Eric Holder pretty much confirmed in so many words what we're already all suspecting: That justice is reserved not for the Wall Street criminals Holder only pretends to investigate, criminals that snuggle up to and worm their way into the Obama administration like so many succubi.
     And the Obama administration has also told us in so many words that justice is not for the war criminals who shot and killed innocent Iraqi civilians in 2007.
     The Obama junta's public record shows that our laws and so-called justice is reserved for people like Bradley Manning who told us of the war crimes being committed in our good names and with our hard-earned tax dollars. It's arrogantly told us in so many words and deeds that "justice" is reserved for Occupy activists (whom Obama can't distinguish from the screaming, racist psychopaths of the Tea Bagger movement) who protested the actions of the same exact people infesting Obama's thoroughly rotten administration like silverfish in a derelict Louisiana bayou fishing shack.
     People, brothers and sisters, fellow Americans on both sides of the Great Ideological Divide, we have met the enemy and it is us. So saith the man who wants to take away your Social Security and Medicare to appease the same cryptofascists who got us into this mess. Obama doesn't want to take away your guns and he has absolutely no interest in you getting affordable health care. He said one thing and did everything the complete opposite the nanosecond he took his greasy paw off Lincoln's Bible on January 20, 2009.
     So, no. Edward Snowden is neither a hero nor a villain any more than Glenn Greenwald's an actual journalist. Snowden was, like Daniel Ellsberg, a man who found himself in the middle of a massive web of lies and crimes that detrimentally affected innocent lives and furthermore found that he was as much a part of the problem as the panicking psychopaths who are now pursuing him over hill and dale. Finding yourself in an intolerable, untenable situation and reacting in a way that'll permit you to sleep at night is not heroism, whatever you sacrifice. It's called survival.
     Let us never cease asking ourselves: "Why do we have so many whistleblowers and what are they trying to tell us that we should know but do not?"

     I knew Paul Cellucci. He was the acting Governor at the time back in the late 90's when I pumped gas at a service station which was owned by a guy who got his start working for Cellucci's father Junior, the longtime Hudson Chamber of Commerce president, who'd founded Washington Street Motors. If you spoke to Cellucci, you immediately were faced with this stultifying sense of dullness of personality, with an indistinct voice that, like Gerald Ford, would and could not be easily emulated by political impressionists. And yet, despite being uncharismatic even as far as Republicans go, Cellucci enjoyed the almost unique distinction of never losing an election in a long career in public service. Even in a heavily blue state such as Massachusetts (although 51% of our voters are registered independents), Cellucci managed to win whether he was running for the state house of representatives, the state senate, the lieutenant Governorship and eventually the top office.
     Argeo Paul Cellucci passed away today of ALS at the age of 65. He'd revealed he was dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease back in January of 2011.
     My recollections of Gov. Cellucci are, as with most voters, of a necessarily worm's eye view. I knew the man on a personal basis, filled up his Jeep Cherokee about once every three weeks and talked shop. Massachusetts, you see, is one of only two states in the union that doesn't have a Governor's mansion so Cellucci used to commute back from Beacon Hill every day to his home literally down the street from my job. His wife Jan would hand him back their watched videos from Blockbuster and sometimes the Governor would pull in for a fill-up while he was running his errands. I used to love addressing him in a Cockney accent because I never before had the chance to say, "'Ey, Guvnor!" to an actual Governor.
     In fact, the first time I ever waited on him, Cellucci was so unprepossessing I didn't even know who he was until I saw his wife Jan's name on the credit card he'd handed me. So, we'd chew the fat, discuss the Family Medical Leave Act he'd just signed into law ("So, now, if you want to watch your kid's soccer game, you can.") that gave Massachusetts workers 40 hours a year off for personal reasons. While I was in the beginning stages of my novel The Toy Cop, I'd asked for Cellucci's help on points regarding the death penalty and what state constitutional law would say about that if we had capital punishment. Not one to forget a favor, I'd mentioned the Governor in my acknowledgements page when I finally published my massive thriller on Create Space.
     But while he may have been lacking in the personality department, Cellucci was a moderate Republican who was wisely chosen by Bill Weld when he was running for Governor in 1990. Cellucci may have been a fiscal conservative (he lowered the state income tax from almost 6% to 5%) but he was also a social moderate to liberal, depending on your criteria. Earlier this year, Cellucci's name appeared on an amicus curiae brief coming out in support of same sex marriage (even though we've had it since May 17, 2004 after the Goodridge vs the Dept of Public Health ruling).
     The biggest scandal to hit his office when he was Governor was over the massive cost overruns regarding the Big Dig, which had more to do with corrupt Boston mobsters getting cement contracts than anything having to do with Cellucci, who at least had the sense to remove the project manager, the stupendously corrupt and incompetent Jim Kerasiotes who had disappeared thousands of records and sandblasted hard drives to cover up what we can assume were countless crimes pertaining to the Big Dig.
     The one thing you could say about Cellucci's administration, which made advances in serious gun control, educational betterment and a whole host of other progressive issues, was that it was incorruptible. Long after Republicans on Capitol Hill had sold their souls to the Devil in his various incarnations through captains of industry, lobbyists, etc, Cellucci's only ethical failing was a weakness for the ponies that had ruined his personal finances (Ironically, after leaving Ottawa as our ambassador to Canada, Cellucci took a job with Magna, a sports entertainment corporation. "Magna chairman Frank Stronach said Cellucci's role would be to help reform the U.S. regulations around horse racing."), handily explaining why he had to use wife Jan's credit card to fill up.
     Cellucci obviously did not enter public service to get wealthy. In fact, he was likely the most broke-ass Governor we ever had. And even when he was fighting for life during the 1999 election that saw him nearly lose to MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger (seen above with Cellucci during their campaigns), even during the highly contentious "Brawl in Faneiul Hall" debate, he always maintained that Old World insistence on civility and a willingness to reach across the aisle in order to do some good by the people (a lesson obviously lost on our current POTUS). Seven years ago, Cellucci even admitted that we were hasty and wrong in invading Iraq and for using his office as Ambassador to Canada to pressure them into joining Bush's ridiculous Coalition of the Willing.
     Argeo Paul Cellucci entered public service with the intention of doing that good. He didn't, like his successor Deval Patrick, use his law degree to get a $20,000,000 golden parachute from Coca Cola after defending that corporation from civil rights lawsuits. He wasn't a rude, raving Tea Bagger like Chris Christie or Paul LaPage. Cellucci was a class act, a man who, compared to the current psychopaths of his party, would almost be considered a liberal today by conspicuous relief. I didn't always agree with the Governor's policies but that's the price one pays when entering public service. It could be argued that Cellucci actually left Massachusetts a better, stronger Commonwealth than he'd found it.
     If we must have Republicans in our midst, then Argeo Paul Cellucci typified the kind we need more of, one that's willing to work in a bipartisan manner and not devote his office to reducing one man to one term (Are we listening, Mitch?) and he did not use his political connections merely to get rich. Paul Cellucci will be missed as much as the moderate Republican he represented throughout his entire career.
     In my own small way, I'd honored Gov. Cellucci yet again by basing part of my fictional Senator James Forrest's character on Cellucci's. He, too, had a brawl in Faneiul Hall and loved movies. And to inspire somebody while they're writing a book, regardless of how good or bad it'll ultimately be, is surely one of the highest praises one can bestow on another.

Last December, I spent two weeks in North Carolina, beginning the daunting task of clearing out my mother's house. Looking back now at the videos I took while I was there, it's amazing that it took ONLY five months to go through what was in that house. Since the beginning of the year, my sister has been in charge of the entire cleanup operation, with a little help from her friends. I've felt guilty all along that I wasn't able to do more, especially when boxes of old family photos, reports I wrote in junior high school, Mom's old autograph book from high school, medical records from her second husband's bout with recurrent thyroid cancer which may once and for all clear up the mystery of exactly what he had, slides from our childhood which I am slowly digitizing, and other memorabilia kept showing up for three months. And that's not to mention the moving truck containing 21 boxes of the Great Teddybear Apocalypse of 2013, an oak vanity and dresser for which I had to find room, a jewelry armoire to hold the costume jewelry I actually kept from Mom's compulsive shopping (never mind the four huge "swap shops" I held at work for bags and bags of the stuff), and The Fucking Victrola, which I immediately had carried over to my neighbor's house, where it looks perfect in their home office.

The Story of the Fucking Victrola is essentially Mom in a nutshell. She had purchased a 1920s upright Victrola for $75 at a flea market when I was in high school. She and her husband had fun with it for a few days, and then it became just a piece of furniture after the novelty wore off. Because I've always loved 1920s music, I coveted this thing terribly, especially when I moved out on my own. When she and her husband moved to Maine, I asked if I could have it, and she said no. Thirteen years later, after her husband had died, and I was going to be driving her to North Carolina for her move down there, I asked if I could have it -- we could load it into the car and drop it off at my house at our overnight stay there. She said no. Mom by then no longer gave a rat's ass about this Victrola, but she was damned if she was going to let me have it. I don't think she even thought about it for twenty years, except to tell me when I asked if I could have it because I would enjoy it, that she might yet use it someday, and saying "You can have it when I'm dead." That's Mom for you -- always withholding, always keeping score, and unwilling to part with anything.

Around ten years ago, I finally broke down and bought my own Fucking Victrola. Mine is a tiger oak Victor VV-VIII, from around 1918. It's gorgeous, though with the lid closed it looks a bit like a casket for a medium-sized pet. I don't play it much, but every now and then I pull out one of the very early records I have and take it for a spin. So when Mom died and I could finally have that Fucking Victrola, I really didn't need or want it anymore, and I didn't have any place to put it. The one I have is more compact and easier to deal with. But I was not going to let it just go. So now my friends have it, they love having it in their home office, and it's with people I know and like.

Towards the end of her life, Mom started to realize just a bit how much pure STUFF she'd amassed. In her last two years, we'd do "jewelry purges" when I'd come to visit. It's not that she bought good stuff, but she bought a lot of it. She was starting to realize that all the better costume jewelry she'd been "saving for good wear" was never going to be worn, and we'd go through drawers and armoires of the stuff, whereupon I'd take it to work and let my co-workers pick what they wanted. I think the only thing more powerful than free chocolate for building goodwill is free jewelry. And Mom got a kick out of knowing that this necklace went to a prom, and that pair of earrings was worn by a bride on her wedding day. One day a friend came to work in a beautiful pair of teardrop earrings that appeared to be diamonds. I commented on them, and she looked at me as if I had two heads and said, "they're CZs...and they're YOUR mother's earrings!" In December, even after those huge purges, my sister and I sat down and spent an entire day going through what was left of it -- and filled boxes and boxes of the stuff, categorizing it as "give away", "donate to thrift shop", "try to sell on Ebay."

It wasn't just jewelry and teddybears, either. Mom's house has two walk-in closets, and only one corner of one of them held clothes that she actually wore -- housedresses and muumuus, many of them with stains on them. These closets were packed full of chothes, most of which she never wore, much of which still had tags. Every storage trunk, every drawer, every plastic storage unit in her closet, was packed with T-shirts sweaters, dress tops, all from QVC, Coldwater Creek, or J. Jill, still in plastic, never worn. This summer, size XL ladies in Pittsboro, North Carolina and vicinity who patronize the local thrift shops got lots of new clothes.

Clothes. Bedsheets still in their plastic packaging. Handbags, some still with tags on them. Shoes still in boxes, some still arriving weeks after she died. Dresses, some duplicates, all with tags on them. For five months, my sister was sending family memories to me via UPS, taking stuff to the thrift shop, and the stuff that just wasn't nice enough to donate went to the "swap shop" at the dump, where people would come and pick the stuff up to use or sell at their own garage sales.

I came to think of Mom's things as being liberated -- freed from the closed-up, blinds-drawn prison of her own making to at last enjoy life. The jewelry got to go out and have fun. The Fucking Victrola is with people who will enjoy it. The piano she played for barely six months until her piano teacher moved away went to someone who will play it. A bunch of the less-collectible teddybears went to a group that sends bears to sick kids in Israel. The Hoosier cabinet you could hardly see is with a friend of my sister's, where it looks gorgeous in her house, festooned with fresh flowers. The Boyds Bears were donated for tricky tray baskets to a fundraiser that a local motorcycle club did for two local families facing catastrophic medical expenses. The oak dresser gives me much-needed additional storage. The vanity replaces a crappy one she'd bought me that never was stable enough to hold anything. Finally I urged my sister to just call a junk hauler and have the dregs of what was left carted away.

And now my mother's house itself is being liberated -- liberated from the gloom and depression and hopelessness that our mother inflicted on this lovely little house for eight years. The house is in a wonderful community called Fearrington, in Pittsboro, North Carolina. It's not gated, but it has a small "downtown" with a bank, hairdresser, restaurants and shops, a pool, health club, and walking paths (some nice photos here). It has all the advantages of a planned community but still feels like a neighborhood. My sister has completely renovated the house -- new paint inside and out, new hardwood floors in the foyer, living room and kitchen, refinished parquet floors in the family room, and an all-new kitchen with maple Shaker-style cabinets, granite countertops, and brand-new appliances. The carpets have been freshly cleaned, and the house is in move-in condition. It has a huge 2-car garage with pantry shelves and a storage closet, tons of storage in a ladder-accessible loft in the master bedroom, 2 full baths (one with stall shower, one with shower-over-tub), two bedrooms, another loft that can serve as an office or guest room, an office alcove that could also serve as a pantry or workshop, a screened porch, gorgeous deck overlooking woods and a creek.



It's a short drive to supermarkets and shops, a short drive in the other direction to the cute downtown of Pittsboro, which has the coolest 1930's ice cream parlor ever. It's a wonderful little house in a great location, and it's ready now to be liberated like the rest of her stuff -- ready for a new family to move in and fill it with the love and laughter that this house deserves; ready to provide memories for a family to cherish. I'm not just astounded by the amazing work my sister has done on this house, but I'm also thrilled at the prospect of people who will love this house moving into it. I know that Mom is finally free of the steamer trunks of emotional baggage that she carried through her life. I know that her stuff is with people who will genuinely care about it. And now it's time to let the light into her house, both literally and figuratively. So if you, kind reader, are planning a move to the Triangle area of North Carolina (alas, my job keeps me in New Jersey for now), or if you know someone planning a move, please pass the word on. The full listing is here, and a virtual tour here.

To look at the house between now and June 22, call Alexis Rudolph at (919) 968-9989. After June 22, ask for Lynn Hayes at the same number.

Labels: families, houseblogging, personal musings

Hey you guys! Guess what! When you adopt a blind kitten, then you have a kitten and kittens are awesome. Don't be scared that they're helpless or some crap. They are not! Yesterday, our completely blind kitten taught herself how to walk down stairs and jump from the landing. It was so awesome I whooped - whooped! - with joy. This has been a public service announcement for adoptable special needs critters everywhere because everyone loves joy.