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Occupy Austin

February 4, 2012 in Rants with 3 Comments

Last night, around 11 p.m., the Austin Police Department proceeded in an enforcement action of new policies established by the City of Austin concerning usage of the public areas of City Hall. In layterms, they evicted the protest.

photocredit: flickr/aaabbbccc8d

I’m torn on this issue. The first amendment freedom of assembly is extremely important. We, as citizenry, have the right to protest peacefully and that is an absolute cornerstone of the American democratic process.

But, I’m a pragmatist. A protest designed to be indefinite, seeking vague goal (“end corporate greed”) with an unclear reason to protest at City Hall seems silly to me. After reading their own brochure, I don’t understand what, specifically, they’re trying to protest. Continue Reading…

SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor: Soft on Crime! (Satire)

January 28, 2012 in Funny, Rants with 0 Comments

With my Senatorial posts this week serving their purpose in my rant department, I’m offering to you a parody reaction to a Sesame Street skit aired on Wednesday.

<satire type=”political judicial”>

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared as a guest star on an episode during the current, 42nd season of Sesame Street. I’m not a follower of Supreme Court activities, but if she is portraying to America’s true her true views, I am in shock!

photocredit: flickr//donkeyhotey

While Justice Sotomayor was having coffee with her friend, Maria, when Baby Bear interrupts with a civil complaint. Goldilocks, allegedly, had entered his home uninvited and damaged a chair. Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant give Justice Sotomayor information concerning any criminal charges levied and the judge did not seek additional information, as this appears to be a prima facie criminal offense.

Goldilocks defense included self-testimony that damaging the chair was an accident. No explanation of why she was in the plaintiff’s home uninvited. Continue Reading…

Respect for the Office

January 24, 2012 in Leadership, Politics, Rants with 3 Comments

I’m calling an audible and changing up my schedule for the week. Tomorrow’s post is a follow up that focuses on my thoughts on leadership as demonstrated in what happened in today’s post.

Leadership is a privilege. We are all called to some form of leadership: in our homes, workplaces and the civic and church communities. However, positions of leadership are something to be earned and carry a great responsibility.

The present reality in our political system amazes me. If we believe the media and the pundits, “the American people” each fall into a distinct category. We are either liberal or conservative. We are either Democrat or Republican, except for those crazy third-party people to whom no one pays attention.

Our politicians should know better. I know many self-identified Republicans who disagree with the Republican Party on certain platform policies. I know plenty of self-identified Democrats who disagree with their party.

Our politicians, by virtue of representing us before the nation and the world, should strive to be above the mud. I’ll grant that their campaigns are waged by underlings, but the politicians themselves should strive to be the model of decorum and respectful, productive disagreement.

Before I show the example that got me fired up last week, this is not a single-party issue. Both sides have this problem. While I’m about to call out a Republican, I could just as easily done it with a Democrat.

The Honorable John Cornyn, U.S. Senator from Texas, is an outspoken critic of President Obama. His right to be, and truthfully, his duty when he believes his constituents would not be well-served by a policy of the President. Continue Reading…

Saturday Rant: Dublin Dr Pepper

January 14, 2012 in Rants with 4 Comments

I’ve loved Dr Pepper my entire life. When I was young, around 6, my sister, Laura, would show off one of my tricks—I’d go to the restaurant that she worked at with her while she was off work, when asked what I wanted to drink, my response would be “What the doctor ordered!”.

For most of my life, Dr Pepper or, in more recent time, one of the off-shoots, would be my soda of choice.

News articles are still, days latter, being published around the quick death of one of the most beloved variants of Dr Pepper: Dublin Dr Pepper.

photocredit: flickr/megpi

For those out of the loop and under a rock, so-called “Dublin Dr Pepper” is the same Dr Pepper made everywhere else, except using pure Imperial sugar instead of the now-default high-fructose corn syrup. In the 1980s or so, when the rest of the beverage world switched over to HFCS, the first Dr Pepper bottling company in little Dublin, TX decided to continue making the product with real sugar. Continue Reading…

Saturday Rant: Is NBC Trying to Fail?

January 7, 2012 in Rants with 0 Comments

Personal rants that have no real purpose except to let me stand on my soapbox will be reserved for Saturdays, so you can plan to specifically visit, or not visit, the site as you please.

<rant>

We’re not big TV watchers, espcially now that we cut the cord and dropped cable. Vanessa loves Bones. I enjoyed the Stargate franchise and “dorky” stuff in that realm. Except for sports, there isn’t anything on TV that I enjoyed enough to make it part of my regular schedule.

Until Prime Suspect.

Prime Suspect is/was a new crime drama in NBC set in New York City. Unlike the NYC cops of Law & Order, these homicide detectives are more human. They have massive character flaws. They get worked up with inner-office politics. They get outright enraged with each other. The main character fights to be respected as a female homicide cop from outside trying to break into the boys’ club of that division’s squad.

I thought it to be well-done and critics agreed. After it debuted, I told a number of people about the show and, if they watched an episode, they agreed that it was fun to watch. We scheduled our workout routine around Thursday nights being an off night (Bones at 8 p.m. and Prime Suspect at 9 p.m. Central typically).

On Thursday night last, I went online to find out if Bones and Prime Suspect were new that week or not. I knew Bones was going to have a weird schedule for part of the spring due to Emily Deschanel’s real-life pregnancy (who plays Bones), but hadn’t seen promos for a new episode of Prime Suspect.

Because NBC stopped production.

The show wasn’t officially cancelled, but without new episodes and needing a pick-up for a second season, I’m not holding my breath. (Would CBS pick it up like they did JAG many years ago?)

This is raised to level of rant by what I read next: Whitney was spared.

If you haven’t seen it, let me explain it in a completely neutral, non-biased way: Whitney is a show written around one female stand-up, Whitney Cummings, surrounded by one-dimension characters that are poorly-written and are only funny because a sound engineer pressed play on the laugh track. Like I said, completely neutral synopsis.

When the Fall lineup was being promoted, Vanessa thought Whitney looked funny (me: eh) and we both thought Up All Night had promise, after all they’re new parents, we’re not-that-new parents. Prime Suspect (all three promo’d together often) looked bad. The badge and gun against the shield of the taxi, while funny, didn’t capture anything of the show’s dramatic element, which made it look like a bad cop drama on a network who cancelled their long-time running cop/court drama, couldn’t find a replacement (Law & Order: LA, anyone see that? Me neither.) and started just throwing badges and guns in front of the camera hoping one would stick.

When premier week rolled around, we watched all three. Vanessa and I were horrified by Whitney. Bad one-line stand-up jokes all piled up into a 22-minute show read by random actors placed in a room and told “go” would be my one-line summary. No chemistry. Not funny, short of the two or three lines promo’d to death by the “marketing” department.

Up All Night. It was decent. The Oprah character was poorly done and enough to get me to not get invested in the show. One of those “Oh, Up All Night is on. Where’s the remote? Over there? Ah, well, this is fine then.” shows.

Prime Suspect. Whoa. Vanessa and I were blown away. It grabbed us. It held us. It made us laugh, get excited, try to figure out who did it, try to figure out the character flaws. Great. Then we kept watching it. The character development over the episodes were well-done. Written well, acted well. The characters, like many of us in real life in challenging office-political situations, would take one or two steps forward and one or two steps back in their relationship.

NBC, the network of “You mean we can’t air Seinfeld and Friends forever?” and the network of “We have the funniest late-night line-up ever! Let’s screw it all up!”, had again dropped the ball. If you don’t believe me, the 1/3rd of the featured items on their online store (visit NBC.com and click “Shop” and a dropdown appears, as of Friday morning) are from one cancelled show (Friday Night Lights) and one show put in “hiatus” (Community, not airing Spring 2012).

My guess is NBC is trying to push people to buy cable to support their numerous cable ventures (A&E, Bravo, CNBC, E!, ExerciseTV, G4, Golf, MSNBC, Oxygen, Sprout, Style, SyFy (which canceled SGU once it actually got a stride going), Weather Channel, USA, VERSUS, among others) since NBC is owned by Comcast and GE.

</rant>