Asteroid Test

THIS IS A TEST. THIS IS AN ACTUAL TEST. HAD THIS BEEN AN ACTUAL ASTEROID EMERGENCY, THIS SIGNAL WOULD HAVE BEEN FOLLOWED BY INSTRUCTION FROM LOCAL, STATE & FEDERAL AGENCIES. THIS IS ONLY AN ASTEROID TEST.

 From FOXSports.Com TEAM REPORT as of 2:02 pm ET, Fri, Jan 5 2001

 By Jim Pauley

 INSIDE SLANT Following a convincing win over the University of Michigan in 1998, John Cooper addressed the media in a cramped classroom in the southeast corner of Ohio Stadium. "I don't feel like I've lost a game," Cooper said of his past futility against the Wolverines. "And I'm not going to take credit for winning this game today. It was our football team that lost. It was our football team that won today." Such was John Cooper as the head football coach at Ohio State University. He could be gracious. He could be likable. And he was the nice guy that finished last all too often. At least against Michigan, anyway. Cooper's allusion was unintentional that November day, but his words echoed those of Woody Hayes. "You win with people," Hayes used to preach. And, in light of Cooper's comment, Hayes' mantra might just as unintentionally have been interpreted as, "You can dame sure lose with people, too." Cooper, self-admittedly, was not a rah-rah type. He felt his players were responsible for motivating themselves. "If you can't get yourself fired up for the Michigan game," Cooper would say, "you shouldn't be playing at Ohio State." But the 18-to-22-year-old age bracket is a fickle bunch, and what worked for Joe Germaine and Bobby Hoying and Eddie George didn't necessarily jibe with Michel Wiley and Ken-Yon Rambo and Steve Bellisari. John Cooper was fired on Tuesday after 13 years at the Ohio State helm. He is the second-winningest coach in the history of the school, but the Buckeye community will forever focus on a few fallbacks in an otherwise fine record. One hundred eleven wins. 43 losses. 4 ties. But a 3-8 bowl record and two victories and a draw in 13 tries against Michigan will forever litter Cooper's legacy. Ohio State fans didn't so much grow up with John Cooper as they grew old with John Cooper. For literal proof, compare the coach's 1988 media guide mug shot to the 2000 edition. Figuratively, he got old with most Ohio State faithful too. Ohioans didn't initially take to Cooper's Southern drawl deep in the hallowed ground of Midwestern football. His hands-off approach on the sidelines didn't make anyone forget Woody Hayes, either. He lost several more bowl games than he won. And, more than the rest, his record against Michigan sealed his fate. When asked on Tuesday what he would do the morning following his firing, Cooper assured that he'd get up early. Finally free from the critics and pressure, the coach said he might just shovel snow or baby-sit his grandchildren. Heck, it sure beats losing to Michigan. A GLANCE AHEAD (2001): The search begins. Ohio State is without a head football coach for the first time in 13 years, and all signs indicate that the program won't take long to fill its vacancy. With recruiting season coming to a climax, Ohio state director of athletics Andy Geiger hopes to conduct a swift transition from John Cooper to his successor. Name-dropping is at an all-time high in central ohio, with everybody from Minnesota's Glen Mason and Pittsburg's Walt Harris to Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren being mentioned. But with Oklahoma's Orange Bowl win on Jan. 3, the smart money miight be on the Sooner's Bob Stoops. In his second season in Norman, Stoops has already won a national title. Does he have anything left to prove at Oklahoma? Will Geiger dangle enough dollars to lure the Youngstown native to Columbus? Chances are we'll know very soon. BEST GAME: The 4-0 Buckeyes returned to their roots in early October against Wisconsin, reeling off 249 on the ground and a season-best 5.7 yards per carry in a 23-77 win.. Senior Derek Combs led Ohio State with 122 yards and two touchdowns, including an 80-yard scamper to open the scoring. TURNING POINT: Coming off a dominating 23-7 win at Wisconsin, the Buckeyes admitted they came out flat against Minnesota in Ohio Stadium. Flat from start to finish, No. 5 Ohio State fell 29-17 to the Golden Gophers, beginning a downward spiral of five losses in the last seven games. WORST GAME: Uninspired from the outset -- the Buckeyes walked onto the field before the game -- Ohio State was embarrassed 24-7 by underdog South Carolina in the Outback Bowl on January 1, John Cooper's swan song as Ohio State Coach. 8-6-08 10:30 p.m. Rog The 9th floor provides "lined paper." Who knew? A December 1982 "National Geographic" provides a solid surface on which to write. Damn. I just leafed through - no sight of any bare West African mocha boobies. And I'm writing with a pen that, technically, I shouldn't have in my room (no sharp objects - / counter that "medium" point is, in fact, blunt.") I'm watching "Men in Black" (MIB, dog) which, admittedly, could be worse. I think PsychWard, I think movies with 1-word titles -- "Heidi," "Rudy," "Titanic." Well, maybe not "Titanic." Thanks so much for coming down tonight. As soon as you left, Andrea asked -almost insidiously - "Why was he here? Did you know he was coming? Did you ask him to come?" "No and no," I told her, all-the-while knowing that you would. Work of the Alien Robot God, I'm sure. Then, I bawled on her shoulder, telling her how fucking lucky I am. I will make it though [sic] this for myself. But I will be just as intent on doing it for my parents and my brother and for you and her. There's so much more to talk about and we will -- soon. Til then, I love you Jim

Play the Game

Sugar Kisses, Sugar Hiccups

KIds In The Kubrick Kitchen

There Will Be Messiaen

This music was written in a concentration camp during World War II.  It was first performed before an audience of prisoners and guards.

I'm the Guy with the Tambourine on the O

Not everyone can carry the weight of the world.

REM Talk About the Passion by Celtiemama

Morning in Clevelandia

Bloomsday strides up the Lakeside entrance to Elsinore Courthouse, which opened its doors to the seething masses of despair in 1976.

The Bridge Is Haunted: The Musical

The Ballad of Ghost #12
(But Now I'm Dead)

(VERSE ONE):
(March)

I once had lived a happy life
no cares no dread
no nagging wife

But then the love bug bit me
on the ass.


So fine i found love-thoughts profound
I saved my scents
and cents and sense

Then went ahead and spent them
on a lass.


She bore me fruit, a boy and girl,
and coaxed my hair
to peppered grey.

And gave me joys and sorrows
everyday.



(CHORUS)
(Gospel)

[Call]:  But, now I'm dead.

                      [Response]: Oh, yes! He's dead!

[Call]: I'm really dead.

                      [Response]: Oh, yes! He's dead!

I never will again lie down my heavy, weary head

[Call]:  So, now, I'm dead.

                      [Response]: Oh, yes! He's dead!

[Call]: I'm really dead.

                      [Response]: So very dead!

And now the only thing i have are ghosts inside my head.


(VERSE TWO)
(Waltz)

When I was just a little lad
I asked my father
what will I be?

Will I be witty?
Will I be wise?
Here's what he said to me:

(CHORUS)
(Gospel)

[Call]: Someday, you'll die.

                   [Response]: You're gonna die!

[Call]: Oh, yes, you'll die.

                   [Response]: We dunno why!

And none of it will matter when you're six feet underground.


[Call]: Someday, you'll die.

                   [Response]: You're gonna die!

[Call]: Oh, yes, you'll die.

                   [Response]: Die! Die! Die!


Enjoy the lives you're given til your hearts refuse to pound.

Port of Call: Clevelandia

VICTORIABORG  (April 15)

Victoriaborg (9) would make a fine wife
to Cleveland, all pit-stained and pudgy for life.

In earnest, she flies the royal colors of Dutch
though allegiance, to her, doesn't mean very much.

If victory's hers as she opens her hold,
Kowalski-esque Borgnine doth take what she's sold.


ISADORA  (April 3)

Isadora, I implore ya,
come and go, in seaway flow

from Amsterdam with Cyprus flag,
Polish owned, you weary hag.

Depart our misty, sacred shores
with Cleveland salve upon your sores.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen...

...lend me your bunny ears.

Eggs 'n Puddin'

The Sound Garden

Smile! You're in Kubrick's Kitchen!

This is Not a Decision I Take Lightly

If truth be told, I've never been a Star Wars fan.  I've sat through them all, sometimes grudgingly, in order to fulfill the canon, and I've been stirred by it, but mostly out of some sort of cultural obligation.  The fact is, as a child in that summer of '77, I was pissed that other kids wouldn't play "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" with me.

"Hey, Sears! Where's my Richard Dreyfuss and Francois Truffaut action figures?" I protested. "You be Terri Garr and I'll try to convince you they're real!" I hoped.

But the pull toward light sabers and robots and empires and rebels was too strong.  My first taste of alienation, I suppose. No pun intended.

So now, as my four year old son wears his R2D2/C3PO shirt never having seen a single episode, I must make a choice.  Which episode shall he see first?

There are two major variables at play:  the medium and the message.

The medium: Should a child see it in a theater with all the available whistles and buzzers of THX and 3D or at home in the comfort of a couch and a decent and loud 2D television?

The message: Where should a child begin in the story? Where I did, with Luke and Leia, or a character generation earlier, with lil' Anakin and Amedala?

The conclusion is inescapable:  The kid's gotta see Episode I on the big screen in 3D, first.

Sure, you'd be right to say The Phantom Menace sucks. But then again, you're not 4 ("Four and a half, really"), and you are no tabula rasa, either.

This is not me deciding how I would have wanted to see them if I had the choice; This is me deciding for the kid, acting as he would act if he had a full appraisal of the facts and history of the matter, substituting my forty-something judgment for his.

Nor does this decision mean that he must "witness" all episodes in the same forum.  I can surely envision him seeing the deathly freeze of Han from the comfort of a couch.

Rather, my kid is immersed in the technologies of our times, and seems to have a cultural awareness beyond his years. Perhaps I'm projecting, but in one shamefully commercially interrupted partial viewing of Revenge of the Sith a few months ago, as the Jedi council met, my kid noticed that some members were "telepresent" and not actually in the room.

I look forward to sharing Star Wars with my kid, nudging him through it, despite my long held distaste for it. In this regard, it is a metaphor for lots of things in life.  And maybe, just maybe, by the time The Hobbit rolls around, he'll have forgotten all about Jar Jar Binks in the embrace of Bilbo.

"Let the pod race begin!"

Lawyers, Nuns & Money, Part III: Houses of the Holy

"Mr. Bloomsday?" A voice from behind interrupts his spontaneous cinematography. He turns from the cemetery behind St. Ruth's to find Sister Beatrice or Bernice approaching with a curious smile.

"Oh, good morning, Sister..." He pauses, unsure of which nun he's talking to.

"It's Bernice," she says.

"Yes, well you and your sister look so much alike, I can never..."

"It's perfectly fine. We're as identical as they come, except I don't have webbed feet."  She sees my shock, and reassures me that she's kidding. "An old joke between me and Bea," she says. "I'm happy to see you. Out for a run?"

"I jog through the grounds regularly to short cut down to the river valley, and the cemetery and statues put me in a peaceful frame of mind."  That and the shuffled Led Zeppelin soundtrack in my ears, he thinks to say but doesn't.  A few minutes earlier, he had been, in fact, intent on a longer and less muddy route to the valley's jogging path, but Houses of the Holy started playing as he approached St. Ruth's, and he felt strangely compelled to modify his course.  Guilty, perhaps. He hadn't packed the kids up for church in weeks.

"I trust you heard the wonderful news about the little girl we though was murdered, but wasn't?" she asks.

"Yes. A remarkable story. You know, if you hadn't gone to consecrate the landfill where you thought she had been dumped, I suppose her reunion with her family would never have happened," he says.

"And if you hadn't so graciously driven us there, we'd have never consecrated the landfill.  Funny how things like that unfold, traced back to the prime mover."

"Primum movens," Bloomsday offers.

"Aristotle by way of  St. Thomas of Aquinas," she says. "A perfectly acceptable detour. Enjoy your run, Mr. Bloomsday."

A perfectly acceptable detour, indeed, he surmises as he heads into the valley, Page and Plant blaring in his ears.

"Until Then, We'll Have To Muddle Through, Somehow..."

It seems obligatory, now, to remind as many as I can of the original lyric:

 Through the years
 We all will be together
 If the Fates allow.
 Until then, We'll have to muddle through, somehow...




 Depressing, perhaps. But also, a more accurate, meaningful sentiment than the cheerier replacement:

Through the years
We all will be together
 If the Fates allow.
 Hang a shining star upon the highest bough...

Here's the best version I know with the wrong lyric:

 

Guest Blogger: Jack Kerouac

America's New Trinity of Love: Dean, Brando, Presley 
[Written at the instigation of the two Helens, Weaver and Elliot 1957]


Love is sweeping the country. 


While wars and riots rage all around the world, in a vortex that resembles the dying Dinosaur Age of Violence, here within her sweeter shores America is producing a Revolution of Love. Three young men of exceptional masculine beauty and compassion and sadness have been upraised by its reaching hands. 


This is strange and it is good. Up to now the American Hero has always been on the defensive: he killed Indians and villains and beat up his rivals and surled. He has been good-looking but never compassionate except at odd moments and only in stock situations. Now the new American hero, as represented by the trinity of James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, is the image of compassion in itself. And this makes him more beautiful than ever. It is as though Christ and Buddha were about to come again with masculine love for the woman at last. All gone are the barriers of asceticism and the barriers of ancient anti-womanism that go deep into primitive religion. It is a Revolution of Love and it will become a Religion of Love. The Garden of Eden might come back in its pristine form. The old American Hero fought the Devil; the new American Hero knows that the Devil never existed except in the minds of anxiety. There will be no more tempting of the woman by the Devil and no banishment from the paradise on earth. 


It's got to be. A Revolution of Love is the positive answer; banishment of war and the Bomb is only a negative answer. There have been Revolutions of Love before, accomplished always by some isolated individual like Cassanova, Valentino, Sinatra. But now the intensity and the need is such, that there are more than one. It's not a vain and self centered thing, but it spreads. This is implicit in the James Dean movie "Rebel Without A Cause" where, when the hero and the girl sneak off to make love in the empty mansion, leaving the desperate boy alone (Sal Mineo), and all the trouble takes place, Dean says: "We shouldnt have left him alone," the girl says "But I needed you," and Dean states "But he needed you too." This is child-like and innocent. "Suffer the little ones to come unto me." There is the need all around to be recognized and adored by some other human being, the need all around for kindness, for the ideal of love which does not exclude cruelty but is all-embracing, non-assertive, simply lovely. Not necessarily the Dionysion orgy but the tender communion. 


As always when something new grows out of the groaning earth, this earth which is a recent event in the cosmic eternity of light, there are angry complaints raised from all stations. The dryer intellectuals complain that the adulation of the dead James Dean by thousands of American girls represents a kind of unhealthy necrophilia; they point out the fact that 1,000 fan letters a month are still being written to Dean as tho he were still alive, asking for his pictures and asking him to come back because they love him. "Even if you look bad and you're all cut up from your car-crash, come back anyway." Yet if Ste. Teresa can make us the holy promise that she will come back and shower the earth with roses forever, this belief in the immortal lovingness of James Dean by thousands of eager believing chicks is well-rooted in a reverential mystical tradition that has certainly never harmed the sleeping babe in his crib. It augurs well for the world that it will refuse to believe that in death endeth loveliness, or endeth enlightenment. 


Elegant complainers say Marlon Brando is ill-dressed, vain, self-centred, Kowalski-Terry Malloy hoodlumish, irresponsible; they picture him as wandering away to leave his girl crying. Yet what is it he has?--that made a girl say "I just feel that Marlon Brando would know how to love me better than any man in the world, that he would go skipping down the street with me hand-in-hand, that he would do anything I asked him, and be kind. Because his soul is free and that's why he's so beautiful!"... Brando is indeed a free soul; his individual approach to his work as well as to his way of life bespeak a strong faith in himself as a man and as an American.

One is the Loneliest Number

Rise of the Planet of the Clares