Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize?

Former Vice President and current blowhard Al Gore was recently awarded the internationally esteemed Nobel Peace Prize. Huh? Unless they gave the award to him for making everyone else on earth feel like they have dynamic personalities in comparison to his own, I don’t see what attempting to create mass hysteria over inevitable earth changes that will probably occurr with or without the hand of man has to do with “peace”. Yeah, thanks for the info, Al. It’s hot…we get it. I have enough things in my life to feel guilty about without having to feel responsible for melting glaciers.

The only trophy Al Gore should be going home with is one for Appearing Awkward While Trying to be Hip on Late Night Talk Shows or Rapid Accumulation of Neck Fat.

7 & 7

Last week, former Jacksonville Jaguar Byron Leftwich was signed by the Atlanta Falcons to be one of their back-up quarterbacks. Many analysts (football analysts, not Freudian psychoanalysts) believe that Lord Byron will eventually take over the starting role for the struggling Falcons. Let me just say that I think it would be hilariously ironic to see the large, lumbering Leftwich try to orchestrate an offense that was designed around the fastest QB in the history of the NFL.

Speaking of the departed and soon to be imprisoned Michael Vick, many who read my page (okay, so it’s just my dad and a few of my friends!) want to know my take on the whole Michael Vick situation since sports and animal rights are a couple of topics that I touch on quite a bit on this page. Well, of course I find the actions of Vick horrific and detestable. This cold-hearted, murdering idiot should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. If it were up to me, he’d be smothered in artificial bacon grease and thrown to a vicious pack of pissed off, rabid Chihuahua’s who have been temporarily taken away from their mother’s purse and pumped up with steroids, growth hormone, and PCP.

I still think that before we go pointing fingers at this obviously sick individual, we take a look at the slab of meat on our own dinner plates. From an animal’s perspective, is this really any better?

Philing in the Blank

There has been an ongoing debate between me and a few other people regarding whether a Jacksonville highway is spelled “Philips” with one “L” or “Phillips” with two “L’s”. The other day, in an attempt to put this debate to an end, I snapped a photo of this highway sign to the left (I pulled over this time to take the shot). The photo (click it to enlarge) clearly indicates that Philips Highway is, indeed, spelled with one “L”. Before, even when I had told certain people about the road signs, they still held firm to believing that Philips was spelled with two “L’s”. Their reason for this was usually tied to the fact that many businesses have “Phillips” with two “L’s” on their signage and in their phone book listings. I realize that this is an easy mistake to make as well as a relatively trivial matter, but it’s a perfect example of mass ignorance. Just because a majority of the people are doing something doesn’t make it right. That sort of reasoning is why we currently have people in high office who can’t pronounce the word “nuclear”.

In the specific case of Philips Highway, I think it’s especially important that we get the spelling correct in order to pay proper respect to A. Philip Randolph, a local pioneer in the African-American civil rights movement.

Belaboring the Point

Today, The United States, the same country whose government tries it’s damnedest to render unions powerless, celebrates “Labor Day”. Isn’t it ironic, don’tcha think? I just love how staunch conservatives (AKA Rush Limbaugh clones) claim that unions are “anti-capitalism”. Using the rules established by our supposedly capitalistic free market, I see nothing wrong with a pool of working using their collective bargaining power to stop production as a way of negotiating higher wages and increased benefits. If an owner doesn’t want to meet their demands, then fine, said owner’s widget doesn’t get manufactured and sold. Of course, I also support the owner’s right to fire the whole lot of them if he/she thinks that the demands are outrageous. Somewhere in the middle there will be a compromise. That compromise is usually the point where it becomes less expensive for an employer to hire and train a new force of employees than to give into the demands of the union. On the flip side, for the workers, that compromise is usually the point that it becomes more beneficial to meet the owner’s demands than to find a new job. That sounds an awful lot to me like business as usual in an economy based on supply and demand.

The next argument against the formation of unions is that they are “corrupt”. Of course, I agree, some are corrupt–very corrupt, in fact. There are some absolutely detestable, selfishly motivated unions that stunt a worker’s progression, to be sure. But are we to judge and regulate every union based on those few bad apples? That would be like judging every corporation based on the discretions of the likes of Enron (this is usually where the liberals step in). That logic is flawed as well. The government should not stop the creation of something just because there is a chance that it could become corrupt (can you tell that I’m a registered Libertarian yet?).

Unions are an important part of our workforce that helped save the backbone of American from having to work in wretched, indentured servant-like conditions until the end of time. They should not be done away with. I am even proud of the Major League Baseball Players Association. That’s right–fuck the owners. I watch baseball because of the players, not because of some crusty old fuck sitting up in a Plexiglas-coated booth, crying poormouth while at the same time refusing to disclose his financial records. If said owner is so bad of a businessman that he can’t succeed financially while owning a business that operates as part of the only legalized monopoly in the United States (see: Major League Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption), then he deserves to drown in his own poor decisions. He does not need the government to step in and bail him out. The owners are replaceable, the players are not–as has been shown time and time again through the hiring of the hilarious “replacement players”. Who can really blame the players for squeezing these shady owners for everything they are worth? Just remember, when it boils down to it, these baseball players are basically just you and me with a little more leverage.

So, on this Labor Day, September 3rd of 2007, I will do my part by proudly endorsing the right of American workers to form a union.

Is this gonna put me on some sort of Black List???

Uniform Opinion

With school now back in session around most of the country, Yahoo! News recently featured a headline story that discussed the increasing number of public education institutions that are requiring students to wear uniforms as part of a strictly enforced dress code. The piece was followed by a Yahoo! Xtra Open Question segment, which asks “What do you think of school uniforms?” (click here to read such insightful responses as, “I hate uniforms………people should have the freedom to wear what they want to,” posted by ‘livnablondmom’)

Students who are opposed to school uniforms generally believe that uniforms infringe upon their freedom of individual expression as well as tarnish their sense of personal identity, as if to suggest that the boring Tommy Hilfiger polo or the trashy, pre-ripped, overpriced Hot Topic T-shirt that they would wear in lieu of a school assigned uniform is some sort of eccentric statement of self-actualization. In addition to the predictable student backlash towards the idea of school uniforms, you have some parents (we’re talking about grown adults here) suggesting that school uniforms force their children to march in “lock step” (because no flimsy argument is complete without a ridiculously over-the-top Nazi analogy). Of course, a lot of these parents are probably part of the same generation that once believed that bell bottoms and tie dyed shirts were instrumental in creating social reform. But it always has boiled down to the clothing, though, hasn’t it? There have only been a handful of true revolutionary pioneers throughout history–followed by hordes of disciples who basically toss the interesting ideals aside and end up just mimicking said pioneer’s wardrobe.

But I digress.

To all of you pubescent beasts out there caught up in the never-ending quest to deviate yourself from the pack despite the unfathomable “oppression” of having to wear identical clothing in the form of a school uniform, here’s a suggestion: try distinguishing yourself with your personality. Or maybe your artistic talents. Your intelligence maybe? Better yet, if you want to be bold and really stand out from the crowd: give a shit about your grades and/or perhaps even–dare I say–graduate! You’ll be the talk of the schoolyard!

Besides, if uniforms are good enough for soldiers to take bullets for their country in, then little spoiled Johnny can sit through his bullshit history lesson in one.

Water Under Troubled Bridges

The recent collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sadly left four dead and 79 injured. More deaths are expected. So, our country is now apparently so busy building figurative “bridges” to bullshit that we can no longer keep up a literal bridge? Now, I know this situation is an anomaly, but then we find out from engineering specialists that this bridge had a 50 out of 100 sufficiency rating and at least 160,000 bridges across America are “no longer structurally sufficient” or “structurally obsolete”. So, I wonder what they are spending all of those tax dollars on then.  Combine the recent devastation in Minnesota with the huge steam pipe explosion in New York two weeks ago, Boston’s Big Dig blunder, and the New Orleans levee catastrophe in the aftermath of Katrina, amongst other debacles, and you have a government that appears to be incompetent at best, and criminally negligent at worst. In fact, the only thing keeping me from believing all-out in conspiracy theories is that, sometimes, the government just seems too fucking stupid to pull off such intricate schemes.

The two basic chores that the government has been expected to do since Jefferson wielded a real ink pen is to create and maintain infrastructure and defend our borders—you know, stuff that is impractical for the private sector to take on. For some reason, they refuse to do both. It seems we’ve got public structures crumbling almost as fast the illegal immigrants can come over and illegally utilize them. Meanwhile, Big Brother finds it necessary to meddle in and waste money on such things as making pot illegal and preventing gay marriage. One tragic instance of terror occurs, and we rightfully spring into action, get our shit together, create superfluous government departments and, up until this point, basically make sure that it doesn’t happen again on U.S. soil. So, I ask: How many levees, bridges, and pipes are going to have to explode to get the bureaucracy into action? I mean, the terrorists aren’t going to have anything left to blow up if all of our shit keeps toppling and exploding on it own! All of this while we are “repairing” the Middle East.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until our wonderful government gains control the health care system!

Motor City not-so-Madman

Animal rights activists love to point a finger at well-known hunters such as Ted Nugent. His in-your-face style of hunting draws the ire of many a PETA member. The image of a man in a leather jacket and cowboy hat with a cute, innocent deer in his cross hairs creates the perfect imagery for groups such as these to take aim at. But when you really think about it, a guy like Nugent should be at the bottom of the list as far as objects of dissent for animal lovers. To me, the much greater perpetrator of all-things-done-evil to animals is your average person going to the grocery store to stock up on meat. Ever think about what animals have to go through to get to the supermarket shelf? If your wondering, go to www.peta.org …it ain’t pretty, folks. Cows, chickens, pigs, and farm raised fish are cramped into such close quarters that they can barely move and are forced to basically live in each other’s fecal matter. Chickens beaks are hacked off, cows are stuffed into tiny crates, shot up with hormones and in some cases paralyzed, and pregnant pigs are bound and crammed into cages they can’t even turn around in. All of this before they are put on a conveyor belt leading to their brutal, untimely death. All of this for the purposes of filling your freezer with increasingly questionable meat products.

Nugent, on the other hand, only kills animals that he eats. If he doesn’t eat them, he actually sends the extra meat to people staving in Africa. He kills these animals as they exist in nature. He doesn’t harvest them like bacteria in some disgusting factory farm. Now, personally, I couldn’t do this. I just couldn’t go out and shoot an innocent animal. But the lesser of two evils when compared to animals prepped for consumption at a disease-ridden factory farm? Absolutely!

Let me put it this way: An alien race invades the planet with the intent of eating the humans for nutritional purposes and presents us with the following two choices. Option one: We can live our entire lives crammed into tiny spaces, wallowing in each other’s piss and shit until we are thrown onto a rack, stunned with overwhelming amounts of electricity, and then slaughtered and packaged for consumption. Option two: We can live our lives freely as we always have with the knowledge that one random day the aliens will come up behind us, shoot us in the back of the head, and then package us for consumption.

Both are awful, but which would you choose? See what I mean?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a huge fan of Ted Nugent. His political views are silly and his music is terrible (the greater offense, in my opinion). And while Nugent is certainly no great friend to the animals, he is much more humane to the animals he consumes than your average meat eater. It’s just not as fun to go after your average Joe eating a cheese steak, though, is it? Think about that the next time you go pointing a finger at The Nuge.

All Fired Up

This astonished me. The picture on the left is an image of central South America taken by NASA’s Terra satellite. Can you see all of the fires? Right, how could you not see them? That is the Amazon Rainforest, and the fires have been going for quite some time now. Take a look for yourself. At any given moment you can look at the NASA satellite images of that region and see huge fires, which are mostly along the border of Bolivia and Brazil. The cause of these fires? Biomass burnings. Biomass burning is a process where people use slash-and-burn deforestation for the purposes of creating new, cheap, and abundant open land. This land is then used by farmers to raise cattle and other livestock. I swear to you I am not joking. This is so absolutely horrific that it’s almost comical—it’s like something you would see in one of those awful children’s cartoons, featuring an over-the-top “evil developer” who is, for some reason, taking sick pleasure in razing some poor kid’s neighborhood.
This has to be the grand slam of environmental destruction. It is so perfectly diabolical that they should win some sort of award for it. First of all, you’re setting the Amazon Rainforest on fire. Unlike the pine- and fir-heavy forests of the southwestern United States, the lush Amazon Rainforest is not well adapted to fire and does not benefit from burnings in the same way. This lush rainforest is a vital part of the earth’s ecosystem. It’s a home to thousands of interesting, exotic species and, as we learned from a bearded, pony-tailed Sean Connery in “Medicine Man,” it could even be the home to a few medical breakthroughs. The smoke from these fires ends up blanketing a large area of the continent, inhibiting cloud formation and rainfall and resulting in animals losing their natural habitat and a considerable amount of damage to the region’s agriculture. These “good ol’ fashioned farmers” then throw a bunch of cattle on it until they are mature enough to be slaughtered and turned into fine, consumable meat products such as Slim Jims, Spam and shit-on-a-shingle–because god knows we don’t have enough meat on this planet (I’m guessing a fair share of this meat gets shipped back to the U.S. to feed our fat asses). The pollution and disease created by close quartered farm animal waste and cow methane farts (which should include those “dealt” by U.S. citizens) completes the ass-raping of Mother Earth. No, “ass-raping” is putting it too lightly. This is strangling mother earth while sodomizing her with a Louisville slugger and taking a shit in her mouth, all this while a bound and gagged Captain Planet is forced to watch it from the corner of the room.

…I’ll give you a moment to erase that from your memory…

Now, I am by no means a fervent environmentalist. I run the water when I shave, I don’t recycle regularly, and I more often than not drink from (gasp!) a Styrofoam cup. Don’t get me wrong, I love the earth and all, but not more than I like a well insulated cold beverage. I do, however, possess this little thing called common sense. You don’t have to be an “environmentalist whacko” to think that sacrificing the Amazon Rainforest by setting it ablaze for the purpose of supplying Taco Bell with Grade D beef may not be in the best interest of the earth and the creatures who call this pebble home. Despite this, you still have blowhard conservatives who think that the notion that humans are at least partially responsible for some of the horrific weather events that have been occurring on this planet I still up for debate. These are the same people who probably also believe that the notion of Creationism is set in stone. What these people are doing to South America is sick, and it shouldn’t take a fucking tree hugger to realize it. The human race had such great potential. Can you believe that this kind of shit is what we did with it?

On Lohan and Hilton (not literally)

I’m really fucking sick of hearing about these two, but they’re in the national news so much these days that I guess I have to comment…

Lindsay Lohan was arrested today for driving under the influence with a suspended licence. This comes months after Paris Hilton’s July 22 drunk driving arrest. I once heard a supposedly true story about two sisters who were going to visit each other only to hit one another in their car on the way to each other’s homes, a tragic accident resulting in the death of both sisters. If the great bearded man in the sky can orchestrate that seemingly impossible coincidence then why, oh why, can’t he have a drunk and high Lohan smash into a drunk and high Hilton on the road? Wouldn’t that be great? Seeing those two fucking reckless dingbats slam into each other and combust into a big fiery ball. I’ll bring the marshmallows!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them to die or anything—maybe the collision just horribly disfigures them while leaving them mentally intact. Then they couldn’t just rely on their looks for the rest of their life. Let’s see how they like actually having to use their brains to get by. Maybe then they’ll think next time they get behind the wheel while they’re drunk off their ass and endangering other people’s lives.

If these two princesses want to get drunk and do drugs, I have absolutely no problem with that. But if they want to travel around town inebriated and high, why don’t they just dip into their fucking kajillions and have someone drive their wasted asses to whatever shitty club they’re going to next?

What’s the moral of this rant? If you’re gonna drive drunk, it better be because you can’t afford a cab!

P.S. While we’re on the subject of Lohan and Hilton…I do not understand what you guys see in them. They each have the body of a twelve year old boy. And it’s always white guys who like women like this, too. You’d never see a black guy wasting his time on one of these Olive Oil-bodied bitches. I’m sorry guys, but if you think that these two are attractive please, please stay away from children because you are one step away from being a full-blown pedophile.

Alright, I confess, I wrote this blog because the names “Lohan” and “Hilton” increase my website’s odds of being found in a Google search. See ya….

Review of the 2007 Jacksonville Jazz Festival

I have made it a point every year since 2000 (there was no jazz festival in neither 2001 nor 2002 due to lack of finances) to attend the annual Jacksonville Jazz Festival. Although I usually always have a good time going with friends and family, to be honest, the music is usually a bit disappointing, save for a few gems and memorable performances such as Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Dot Wilder in 2005 at The Jacksonville Landing. Always hoping that one year the festival will absolutely blow me away, this year I attended the event on all three days and hit every venue except The Ritz. The highlight of this year’s festival was the ‘Round Midnight Jazz Jam located at the Marriott on Salisbury in Southpoint that went from 10p to 2a. The event encouraged anyone with an instrument to participate and play alongside the likes of the Kelly-Scott 5tet, J.B.Scott, Joshua Bowlus, Danny Gottlieb, and Dennis Marks. It was excellent in the way that jazz should be excellent–improvisational fashion. You just can’t beat an eight or nine-year-old prodigy on the drums jamming alongside the likes of Gottlieb and 15 other people with saxophones taking turns at the mike to do their thing. Fantastic! While it was free, it was the most fun I have had at any Jax Jazz Fest related event in quite some time now. The ‘Round Midnight Jam is a great addendum to the festival indeed, but it speaks volumes that this was the best thing that this once proud festival had going for it over the weekend.

The Jazz Fest was better when WJCT ran the show. Now that the city of Jacksonville is running it, the problem is not that they aren’t spending money on headlining acts but that, when they do decide to spend loads of money on a notable headliner, they are bringing in the wrong people. Tony Bennett? Kenny G.? Chris Botti? These guys make Michael Buble look like Charlie Parker for Christ’s sake. I thought this was supposed to be a “jazz” festival, not a “pop nostalgia acts of yesteryear” festival. Come on. This is a festival that once featured Miles Davis! And I’m sorry, but the headlining acts have been white way too frequently over the recent years. In a genre invented, perfected, and quite frankly dominated by African-Americans, this is not only unacceptable, but a gross statistical anomaly as well.

As for the event being showcased at various venues, the festival should be condensed to Metro Park exclusively, with the possible exception of The Jacksonville Landing hosting a couple peripheral and/or local acts or something. But it has to be outdoors. I mean, the word “festival” almost implies “outdoors,” doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I love The Ritz and The Florida Theatre and all, but being shuttled via a cramped trolley from a wide open park on a gorgeous day to the confines of a dimly lit, ancient theatre with sectioned rows of seats is kind of a buzz kill. One of the lures of the Jacksonville Jazz Festival in its prime was being able to relax at an outdoor venue and enjoy the music. You know, “relax”—which does not entail calculating how much of Chuck Mangione’s show you’re going to have to truncate in order to have enough time to frantically run and catch the next trolley to the Florida Theatre to see the last half of Dianne Reeves’ performance. I don’t know about the rest of Jacksonville, but my idea of fun is NOT trying to coordinate a fucking trolley schedule.

The official Jazz Fest poster was a little weak this year in comparison to the last few years as well.

And don’t even get me started on the overtly smart-ass (overly dumb-ass), pointlessly rude city workers on staff at Metro Park…

You know, Albert Einstein’s once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

With all of that said–I can’t wait for next year’s fest!