It appears that Trayvon Martin, being stalked by an armed vigilante acting in opposition to direct instructions from a 9-1-1 operator, fought for his life against his attacker and managed to do some damage before his assailant gunned him down. We know this because there’s photographic evidence that his assailant was banged up.

By all means, that’s proof enough for me. Obviously his murderer should be released, because if Martin had really wanted to live, he wouldn’t have put up a fight against an armed stalker who came at him from the darkness. In our current society where common sense has become an oxymoron, who wouldn’t understand that?

PAD

No, not me. A different one. And if you think some of my friends were startled to see my name at the top of an announcement that “Peter David” had died in a car crash, I gotta tell you it’s inCREDibly creepy to see your own name in that headline.

Continue Reading “R.I.P. Peter David” →

Since it’s not exactly genre, we haven’t discussed the new series “SMASH” which will be wrapping up this coming Monday. So I figure, What the hëll. Let’s do that.

First of all, I’m kind of astounded that the series got on the air in the first place. It’s a show for which Kathleen and I are the target audience, and that’s NEVER a promising endeavor. The ratings for the Tonys indicate that the vast majority of America doesn’t give a dámņ about real Broadway, so why in the world would they be captivated by a TV series about made-up Broadway? If they want to see something on TV about performers struggling for their shot, they’ll put on “The Voice” (the show’s lead-in) or “American Idol” where it’s involving real people, or at least nominally real. Judging by the ratings, viewers more or less haven’t embraced the show, for those reasons and others, and yet NBC has given it a second season pick-up. Which is good, because we’ve been enjoying the hëll out of what has been remarkably schizoid ride. And I mean that in a good way.

Continue Reading “Let’s Get “Smash”-ed” →

I’ve been saying for ages that I didn’t buy for a minute the notion that President Obama had any problems with gay marriage. Not for a moment did I think that a guy whose parents, less than half a century ago, would not have been allowed to marry in some states, would believe that legally keeping people apart who love each other was an acceptable way of doing things. But I think that he was concerned about the political backlash. Me, I think he should have said screw the backlash and just been honest. Then again, that’s easy for me to say, because I wouldn’t have had to worry about going all-in on my political ambitions with this issue. He probably felt he needed to save his political capital for health care, which we all know is rock solid steady and couldn’t possibly be overturned or set aside.

In any event, whether Joe Biden’s honest answer to the question was a trial balloon or simply forced Obama’s hand, it was obvious that his foot-dragging toward an inevitable “reversal” of his “evolving” opinion was going to have to happen sooner rather than later. Based on surveys, the GOP is (once again) on the wrong side of this issue, and the people who pointlessly hate the idea of gay marriage were likely not voting for Obama anyway. So in theory nothing is lost and some good will is gained. The other bit of timing that I liked was that it came in conjunction with North Carolina’s obscenity of an anti-marriage, anti-civil union amendment (which also impacts heterosexuals, so brilliant move there.) North Carolina comes across as so stupid, you’d almost want to joke that it should marry Arizona, except of course that would be illegal. One North Carolina politico claimed that they hoped this would send a message to the rest of the country. Well, I think the President of these United States sent a message right back: everyone who voted for it was wrong.

My one regret is that Obama basically said that it’s still a state issue. I mean, yeah…he’s right. But so was slavery, once upon a time. I wouldn’t have minded him putting forward a case for possibly taking it to the national level. I don’t pretend to understand these things, but I wonder if a class action suit in North Carolina by disenfranchised gays AND straights would be the ticket to a Supreme Court ruling.

PAD