Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Avatar Hot Boy

I spend hours a day on the computer looking things up, jumping from one link to another and wondering how the world survived without a search engine. The Google is the best little engine that could since my college girlfriend researched and wrote all of my papers during the four years of the Revolution when I was out doing god knows what. I paid her well for keeping me afloat during those turbulent times. At that point in my life, I was young and healthy and my get up and go had not yet gotten up and left. I also still had all of my teeth.

I received a rather strong GPA from all of her efforts; yet that one-sided relationship set in motions years of selfishness and ego-maniacal behavior, for I believed every woman in the world would treat me with such kingly Rush Limbaugh subordination.

Then I woke up and discovered it was a dream, and I have been hugging a very animated adult Chia pet ever since. I still have my college girlfriend's magical Underwood typewriter, just in case the UW ever asks me to prove I did my own papers; she has certain Polaroid’s that the FBI would find interesting to fill out certain archival questions. We haven't exchanged Valentine’s Day cards since Watergate.

I digress, for I have eaten only almonds today. For some odd reason, eating almonds makes me nostalgic. I have no idea why; neither do any of the clinicians I keep on the payroll. Now back to today's subject.

Avatar Hot Boy is the title of today's post. Sounds pornographic, perhaps it should be, but it isn't. Due to ways Google algorithmic spiders work (and don't ask me how because I can't even follow the explanation on Wikipedia myself), typing these three words into the search engine popped my blog up nearly to the top of the list. I know this because a reader from Hanoi did just that recently. The poor guy ended up temporarily looking at all of my swirling pictures of dancing cows, marching bands, Ellis Island immigrants and most importantly, the schematics of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile before clicking out. I hoped my reader from Hanoi stuck around long enough to play the University of Wisconsin Marching Song.

I had written a post about Avatar: The Last Airbender, several weeks ago, complaining that once more Hollywood was walking down the Charlie Chan route of casting white actors in Asian roles. A live action movie was in the process of pre-production planning and the Asian community was up in arms at some of the major casting choices. Granted the creators of the animated series were white as were most of the primary voice actors, but the cartoon design and story arcs were straight anime, giving off the impression that this was a non-western series. My point was why would Hollywood court a racially insensitive problem it could so easily avoid?

The complete title of the post was Hot Air Bender is still Old Hollywood Gas. Okay, it was a silly sounding title, punning "hot air" with "Hollywood Gas". So sue me for making it as clever as boiling water. The word "Hot" combined with a partial listing of the blog name,Greenbush "Boy", plus the word "Avatar, was enough information for Google to go to town.

But why did he (I presume it is a he) sequence these three words together in the first place? Initially I had no idea. Today he came back again Googling the same three words. This time I did some backtracking on Google links (the closest I will ever get to forensic diddling around), and discovered my visitor was not interested at all in the cartoon series. Even in Hanoi the making of James Cameron's Avatar is news enough to track. My visitor was searching for the latest images of Na'vi, an incandescent blue female (I wonder how you can tell?) that, except for the tail, looked similar to Mystique.

This Avatar design is hot...boy is it hot! Apparently this was one of dozens every teenage boy and man-child thought initially was the alien look for Cameron's decade long in the making sci-fi epic. Well it ain't, because dozens of web sites have their own "this is the true version" of Cameron's vision and none of them are correct. So many of these images are now floating out there in the cold waters of the Internet, they're forming their own icebergs in the North Atlantic and crashing into each other. So my curious friend in Hanoi, keep reading blogs like EW.com, io9.com, First Show.net, or Cinematical, because one of them will eventually hit design pay dirt for you.

This has given me an idea. As a blogger I face millions of others who shoot off their mouths daily for no other reason than they can and someone has been kind enough to make them breakfast. How do I market my blog? Make it visible? Keep people constantly coming back for more? I mean the Wienermobile can travel only so far!

From now on all of my posts will have one or more "hot" words in the title: Porn, Hemorrhoids, Murder, or Implants, for instance. The subject matter will have little if anything to do with the title, a bait and switch technique I first discovered while running for Mister Congeniality in grade school. With provocative keywords like these, who knows who else might stumble onto my blog site? Perhaps even Bin Laden will drop by long enough to stop using Master Chief as his dance instructor and listen to "On Wisconsin".

Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Grapes of Wrath are no longer affordable

Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell

"A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody . . . Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too."

Tom Joad, "The Grapes of Wrath"
Do today's high school students still study John Steinbeck's, 1939 classic , The Grapes of Wrath, a novel infused with indomitable perseverance, personal sacrifice, and a Christian tenderness towards the truly less fortunate? If not, they should. Given our current financial mess, perhaps they’ll find it stimulating reading while marching from city to city looking for a job.

I remember my dad once telling me that no generation can know how resilient it is until it survives a depression. Wars, he said, come looking for the young every five minutes, but a drop on your knees financial Armageddon like the Great Depression tests the true mettle of the human spirit. While cathartic, pointing a gun at a bank building rather than at an enemy soldier wins you no ground except in a prison yard.

The Bizarro World of Republican political consultants fascinates me for they speak a language of callousness and brass-balled inflexibility towards the poor, the weak and the infirm that would have Jesus picking up the 16 oz gloves. Cloned from tombs rather than born from wombs, these characters spew forth enough foul bilge water on the 24/7 cable news services to inundate most of the fly over country which they swear they speak for. They utter the word "No" more often than the girls I asked out in high school (and college and post college). The "facts" they herald with such impenitent certainty emanate from orifices that only proctologists are licensed to explore.

The current Obama stimulus plan has them harmonizing in tongues. They speak "fat cat" lingo as a Woody Guthrie lament. Their latest appellation of dread is the term “class warfare” as if that's a ballad alien to these shores. According to them, this measure will suddenly pit rich against poor, businessmen against labor, gerunds against dangling participles. The world is coming to an end and non corporate Socialism is just around the corner. These chicks and chicken hawks either know so little about this nation's history or hope none of the viewers do. America is nothing if not a constant train of Credit Mobilier schemes and scandals. In fact we've had more booms and busts in our 200 plus years than an all night Vegas burlesque show.

Who are these lockstep lemmings? Which casting agency recruits them? How long does it take to fill their heads with the same identical talking points? Who pays for their straight teeth and the women's flouncy blouses? And how can they find so many young black Republicans to speak like so many young white Republicans? Questions left unanswered.

They hate everything they personally have themselves and they make a nice living at it. Can anyone believe that these jokers walk around with no medical coverage, for instance? Their invectives against that idea are loud enough to crack off the nose of Mt. Rushmore's Washington. Or that they don't get paid hefty fees by various political action groups or think tanks to run around like well coiffed but highly rabid Ole Yellers (I grant a poor play on words). Perhaps one day after a spirited discussion on said issue, one of the highly paid 24/7 teleprompter readers might ask one of these babbling bloviators which health coverage they have and whether it is a PPO plan or, like for the rest of us, the UFO option.

Wouldn't it be nice if one day all of us had the same benefits as Senator Lindsey Graham and Congressman John Boehner and even Congress’s very own Vampira, Michelle Bachman? They seem to have problems bestowing on the American people the same beneficence afforded them. I wonder if that can be construed as classless warfare.

I will continue to watch the distaff Republican spokespersons. They resemble the type of woman I've only been able to speak to after placing several cool crisp Franklins in their hands. If truth be told, I get turned on by vixens who use enough lip gloss to lubricate truck axles.