Diskage:
DVD • Pulp Fiction
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Queensryche - Operation: Mindcrime
• Mad Season -  Above
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• Skinny Puppy - Too Dark Park
• Metallica - ...and Justice For All

Books Lying Open
• The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were, Michael Page & Robert Ingpen

Soul-Devouring Worry
• The missing toenail clippers will never be found.

When I Grow Up:
• I'll live up to my potential.

Curse of the Day:
• May your sugarplums stubbornly-refuse to dance.  Even for Xmas.

Daily Update
Well I lied yesterday.  I said I'd be hurting tonight if I were awake while actually I feel pretty good.  It's just past midnight, and I just woke up after sleeping for about 7 hours.  I'd been awake over 24 hours Saturday, but didn't work that hard at the college game, and it woke me up.  When I got to work I was really fading, dozing off sitting around before going out to sell crap, but after work I felt wide awake, and watched some TV (it seemed like every college game on sucked), ate a lot to restore energy, and then finally crashed around 4:30pm, hoping I'd sleep like 12 hours.  I didn't, I never do, but long enough anyway.

I've got a bunch of backed up news items, and want to do some other work tonight, so I'll just dump the news and a quick thing I wrote about trophy wives below.

There's a piece of Britney-porn, if you click the one link.  Woot.  Or not.

• Troubling article about the mysterious "No-Fly" list that all US airlines have access to.  Get your name on it and you won't be flying anywhere.  Have a name similar to a name on the list and you'll probably get questioned in a back room and miss your flight.  Want to get your name off the list?  Good luck.  No government agencies will admit to having final oversight of the list, and you might get cleared one time and then next trip to the airport you spend six hours sweating in a small brightly-lit room while deputies cut up your luggage looking for secret compartments.  Been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience?  You might want to take the train.

Airport officials said at the time that Oden was barred from boarding because she was uncooperative with security procedures, which she denies. Instead, Oden pointed out that the American Airlines ticket clerk -- who marked her boarding pass with an "S" -- had acknowledged she wasn't picked by random.

"You were going to be searched no matter what. Your name was checked on the list," he said, according to Oden.

"The only reason I could come up with is that the FBI is reactivating their old anti-war activists' files," said Oden, who protested the Vietnam War as a young office worker in Washington, D.C. "It is intimidation. It's just like years ago when the FBI built a file about me and they called my landlord and my co-workers. . . . They did that with everyone in the anti-war movement."

The point, of course, is that while the dep'ty dogs are triple searching people who were arrested at a Dow Chemicals plant sit in twenty years ago, and not getting updated info on their No-Fly list, they're not paying attention to other people who might be the real terrorists. 

• This one cracked me up.

Tanya Collins said her son, Casey, scrabbled up a 25-foot tree on Aug. 14 after she told him they were going to the store for milk and bread. Casey, a fifth-grader, said he feared they were really headed for his mother's fiancé, whom he doesn't like. Collins went back inside the house, grabbed the BB gun and aimed it at Casey, she told police.

I mean it's horrible and wrong and everything, but it's just so dumb.

• In other less amusing child abuse news,

SWEENY, Texas (Reuters) - Police arrested a Texas man on child abuse charges on Friday after he allegedly used a 100,000-volt stun gun to discipline his 8-year-old stepson for missing the school bus.

Theodore Moody, 27, was charged with two counts of felony injury to a child and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. The boy's mother, Tsianina Moody, was charged for failure to report the abuse, for which she could be jailed for up to two years, said Brazoria County Sheriff's Investigator Buck Henson.

Moody, a stay-at-home father who quit his job as a truck driver this year, allegedly walked behind the child all the way to school on Monday and zapped him with the stun gun.

I like that "stay-at-home father" part. Or as they used to be called, "unemployed shiftless layabout".  Talk about your evil stepfather.  I wonder if the kid's missed the bus since then any?

• International bankers are meeting in Washington DC this weekend, and protesters are trying to get out in force.  The cops are not having any part of it though, and are basically arresting people as fast as they can handcuff and drag them away, according to news reports.  They aren't being real discriminating either, apparently.

Demonstrators and legal observers said police made no effort to disperse the crowd and refused to let people leave before beginning the arrests. "They took out not just activists, they took out bystanders, they took out tourists," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice, which sued the city over police tactics during demonstrations two years ago.

Among those arrested was the executive director of Greenpeace, John Passacantando, who said he was just riding his bicycle to work near the demonstration.

Interesting photo of heavy-handed cops can be seen here.

• Ironic and amusing editorial by Ted Rall.  I don't usually agree with his extreme politics, but the man is a damn clever writer.  In this one he puts the US in the place of Iraq, with the world calling for weapons inspections.

"Nearly two years ago, the civilized world watched as this evil and corrupt dictator subverted the world's oldest representative democracy in an illegal coup d'état," said Khatami. "Since then the Bush regime has continued America's systematic repression of ethnic and religious minorities and threatened international peace and security throughout the world. Thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Basic civil rights have been violated. This rogue state has flouted the international community on legal, economic and environmental issues. It has even ignored the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war

 

Khatami said the U.S. possesses the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, weapons "that, when first developed, were used immediately to kill half a million innocent civilians just months after acquiring them. No nation that has committed nuclear genocide can be entrusted with weapons of mass destruction."

 

"Even before Bush, the American political system was a shambles," said Prof. Salvatore Deluna of the University of Madrid. "Their single-party plutocracy will have to be reshaped into true parliamentary-style democracy. Moreover, the economy will have to be retooled from its current military dictatorship model--in which a third of the federal budget goes to arms, and taxes are paid almost exclusively by the working class--to one in which basic human needs such as education and poverty are addressed. Their infrastructure is a mess; they don't even have a national passenger train system. Fixing a failed state of this size will require many years."

The case made in the article, using all true events (with some editorial slanting) is quite compelling, and illustrates the point that you can't just judge something by what its enemies say about it, since truth is easy to twist, and allegations are easy to make.  Of course Bush didn't do anything like this about Iraq; his every comment was completely truthful and accurate and unbiased.  Right? 

nother reason to hate rich guys.

The hot chicks they get, while the rest of us have to settle for some scab we picked up at a Bennigan's over a plate of buffalo wings, and know we'll just end up fighting with over money and how we're always working late with that cute redhead from personnel, before she inevitably smashes up our apartment in a jealous rage and cleans out the checking account before flying back to Kansas City to live with mother.

• Exhibit one is this picture of Tiger's girlfriend, on hand to watch him lose Ryder Cup matches. That's a pretty good girlfriend, really.  The only thing more boring than playing golf for eight hours is watching it, and she's out there walking around in the gallery without a perpetual yawn on her face.
• Exhibit two is Justin Timberlake admitting to performing some gamahuche on Britney Spears.  I'd imagine it looked a lot like this.

That nude pic of her reminds me of this site, which I saw some weeks ago.  It's a weird site by a guy who is crusading against the shocking (to him) and horrible (to him) practice of selling fake nude celebrity photos on eBay.  Ironically, he includes numerous uncensored fake celeb nudes in his ranting.  I would almost wonder if he's trying to get a job as a publicist or is maybe a plant; I mean who really cares if celebs have some fake nudes of them flying around?  They worked their whole lives to be famous, they earn a colossal living doing TV or movies or music, they can take a few fake nudes.

Now if some guy were creating those of a woman he knew at work, or his ex-girlfriend, and causing her serious defamation and unwanted attention by publicizing them, I could see that being a serious issue.  With celebrities I see it almost as a fair use thing, or satire. 

No one believes that there is an explicit photo of Mira Sorvino performing fellatio, so celebrities are easier targets for this sort of thing, but also somewhat immune to it being taken seriously.  Which isn't to say that if I were the celebrity involved I wouldn't be really pissed off.  I also think this should be illegal to sell, but the fact that it's being sold isn't exactly enough to outrage me.

One thing that's always amused me at work is the player's wives/families seating section.  There's one section right behind home plate on the plaza level that usually has at least half the seats empty, even when most of the other levels are full, and seated there are usually half a dozen or more women who possess model-quality beauty.  With no men.  The reason, as you've probably grasped already, is that that's where the players get their comp tickets, and the women are their wives/girlfriends.  The empty seats are due to them all getting about 4 tickets per game, and usually not having anyone sitting in them.

The employees check in area is out in the parking lot, by the main tunnel entrance.  This is where all the deliveries come in to the warehouse, and there's always a tractor trailer parked there that's entirely full of ice (delivers a fresh full load every few days).  Forklifts ferry pallets of half a ton of ice from there up to the drop off spot by the warehouse, and from there it gets delivered to all of the vending and concession stands.

Anyway, from the main tunnel you go up a sloped hill into the bowels of the stadium, and there is a fork in the road.  To the right it continues uphill and goes to the main company offices and warehouse and kitchens and service elevator and other such things.  To the left the road goes downhill and runs into a metal door like a garage door (rolls up and down) that is between it and the field level.  This is where deliveries to field level go out, since they can't very well drive a fork lift with 100 kegs of beer down 4 flights of stairs.

Near the large door to field level there's a hallway to the right, and it leads to the locker rooms for baseball, football, and the visitors' locker rooms.  This is how the players and their families enter.

I belabor this explanation, but my point was to say that the players and their wives park right next to where we check in, and we walk through this parking area on the way into the tunnel, as we head up to whatever stand we're working in that day.  The players are there way earlier than I arrive, so I seldom see them, but their wives often drive up once we're standing around waiting to check in, and we walk past their cars.  They all own BMWs and big SUVs for the most part, with a few Porsches and such thrown in.  No one has a really flashy sports car now, at least not that I see at the stadium.  The one who used to was Benito Santiago, when he was on the Padres some years ago.  He had a white convertible Ferrari and a black convertible that was even more exotic.  I don't remember, but it was a Mazerati or something like that.

I often wonder where the players meet their wives.  I mean most of the players are just big dumb jocks.  They played baseball in high school and college and the minor leagues, and because they could throw harder or hit better than 99.9% of the population, they progressed to the major leagues and are now rich, for the most part (Younger guys are only making $300k or $500k, but once they get past 3 years they get big raises, and past 6 years they're making multi-millions per year.)

And they all have, without exception, model-beautiful wives.

No one seems to have a plain girl who they fell in love with for her personality, oddly enough.

The wives often dress casually, just in jeans and a t-shirt, but sometimes they are way overdressed for the stadium, in dress suits or designer outfits, and almost always with at least two or three obscene pieces of jewelry.  I'll sell their kids a cotton candy or frozen lemonade from time to time, and the woman will be digging out quarters to pay me while there's a rock on her finger the size of a robin's egg.

They're actually pretty nice, or at least not snobby bitches, and usually tip a bit, so I don't have complaints about them.  I just wonder how they hooked up with the players in the first place.  I'm not saying they are gold diggers, but you've probably noticed in society that there is a very high concentration of beautiful women around rich men.  And vice versa, I suppose, though to a much lesser extent.  I can see this in Hollywood, where movie stars and executives and aspiring actresses mingle at parties or meet at their agent's office.  But where do aspiring baseball players meet such gorgeous women?  Do the women know each other? I mean does a player's wife meet other beautiful women at the spa or beauty salon and introduce them to her husband's co-workers? Do the beautiful women in college gravitate to the star players, wanting to be with them, at least on some level, since they know the guy will probably be a millionaire in a few years?  Do the players have their pick of groupies early in their career or in the minors, and pick out the prettiest ones to marry/date?  Maybe the players spot beauties working in restaurants or bars or expensive stores; and the women there are working there at least half-looking for some handsome rich man to marry?

Anyway, I guess I've answered my own question, at least in speculative fashion.

I was thinking that since the players are big dumb jocks (for the most part) they weren't likely to be hanging around high society parties or other places where you'd see the rich and beautiful and be able to meet gorgeous women.  And that's probably true, but there are other ways to hook up than being a movie star and going to a casting agency to page through the aspiring actress/model books and pick out ones you like.

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