A long, rainy day

Sometimes the world looks grim and getting up seems not worth it to have to gnaw off your restraints to be able to fight it. Actually the activity was as pleasant as any other day but the world news, the weather, and talking heads were more than I wanted to make something out of.

The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited is full of surprises at every turn. There is nothing predictable in the behaviors of characters in this script. Wes Anderson, who also directed the Royal Tanenbaums, put the action in India. It provided enough local interest to add to the the excitement of never knowing what would happen next.

Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman are brothers in a dysfunctional family whom the director develops as characters while in a wild travelogue.

If you like fast moving movies with abrupt twists, this is one to see.

Head ramblings to the T V

Whenever I work, I can only focus when I have the radio, TV, or something else to occupy some of my senses. Today I am watching the Dalai Lama as I write this. As this good man speaks, the headline below reads "Bush Angers China". Do any others find this as silly as I do. In my mind, that is extremely provocative to China. It makes me want to buy Bush's people the old book by Dale Carnegie, HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE. It is rather difficult to find countries left the US haan't dissed somehow. If China called for payment of what we owe them, they would own us.

Bush took a position I completely support. I do not take issue with his position. I take issue with the headline placed there, no doubt by some non-tactful media person which Bush's people either didn't watch or thought clever...in either case, or another, it reflects the insensitive politics we have been using for some time. The media presents itself like the Saturday serials, the cliffhangers of a couple of generations ago. 'Stay tuned to this broadcast to find out what the latest disaster is in California', thus leaving a terrified public, with relatives in that area, waiting through the too-many commercials and other stories to find out what happened.

The average person can no longer distinguish between political entertainers like Limbaugh, Stewart, SNL or others. Newspapers have been sold so often, while retaining the name, that few people really know the hidden agendas of the owners. How many people realize that the Washington Times is owned by the Reverend Moon, who considers "he was "sent to Earth . . . to save the world's six billion people. . . . Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent." (The Washington Post, 6/23/2004) Are people aware that the Washington Post, Slate and Newsweek among many others are under one ownership?

If control of media is power (and I believe it certainly is) then see what Rupert Murdoch holds.
If your stomach can take it, scroll all the way down to the news and radio stations, TV holdings, etc. Whatever happened to the original intent not to allow one company to own more than one newspaper and one radio station? The FCC let us down on that one, for sure.

DRM (Digital Rights Management)

KaZaa and Napster are familiar names. Both were prohibited by adjudication from allowing file sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America is suing usenet.com, decrying it as the next Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer, illicit file-sharing sites. Napster's desktop client migjht have a solution, In an effort to rope in more customers, the music subscription service has announced that it's ditching its client download and moving to a web-based platform.

There are so many places to listen to music on the Internet these days (easily linked to hand held devices). Rather than ponying up millions of dollars in advance to offer Sony/BMG's music videos on its MySpace site, News Corp. has struck a deal with the major label that will allow it to embed music videos and select audio on the artist pages of Sony/BMG artists in exchange for an undisclosed percentage of the ad revenue generated by that content. Everyone wants a piece of the action and the ones who get the least out of it all are the artists who made the music in the first place. Ah technology and progress, right? Without the artists there would be none of this. Which is the host and which is the parasite?

Let George Do It

In WWII, I first heard the expression, "Let George do it." pertaining to having sex with a virgin. Then the "Do what Feels Good" generation was spawned. Today, it is , "Do whatever it takes." but not in the context of a compassionate, moral goal, but rather, to amass as much money as possible regardless of the cost to other's lives, hence Enron was able to emerge with others behaving similarly. The rift between lowest wage earners and CEOs has grown exponentially in the past few years until, at last, shareholders are speaking out against it with some small success.

What happens to women in the oldest profession, who become the oldest citizens? I had never thought about it. However, some very compassionate people in Mexico (you know it can't happen in the US because so many religious people think compassion is only for the good and moral) have demonstrated its meaning. Our legislators, those who control the pocketbook for our country, are too often hypocrites because so few of them are without sin, but they make laws and preach against their moral definitions of sin. They won't even allow families to be compassionate to one another. Euthanasia is forbidden, though a relative may be suffering an unnecessarily protracted and excruciating death, pleading for the right to die.

We spend billions for a useless war, but we can't lower the rate of drug addiction because we think it more costly than warehousing drug users in jails and leaving them with nothing for when they finally get their 'get out of jail free' card.

Were the priest-sexual-predators demonstrating the compassion we have been told is part of their training and that which they teach? Do the corrupt politicians and law enforcement agencies show compassion?

Is it compassionate that currently in the USA, the rich get richer and better educated, while the poor get poorer and less literate? For tedious reading on the subject, read this. When seeing crimes being committed, people being hurt, request for charitable contributions, we seem to be back to, "Let George do it."

My kind of travel

Many of my friends save for the whole year to take a week's vacation in some distant place. My preference has always been to spend my money on my home and its contents, to make my home a vacation place all year. All my hobbies and toys are here. Sometimes someone manages to drag me away for a bit, or I brave a visit to family in London. I've been to Spain, Morocco, Greece and many of its islands, Turkey, Alaska, the Panama Canal and some of Central America, and lots of Caribbean Islands. In St. Thomas, we tourists were warned not to leave the center of town alone. My curiosity genes are reallyhealthy and always active, so my husband and I peeked beyond and saw abject poverty while the center of town looked like 5th Avenue jewelry stores. In Spain, Morocco, Turkey and Central America, child beggars clung to us to ask for money, undoubtedly thinking we were wealthy and could spare lots of it. This doesn't happen on TV travelogues.

Occasionally one hears that travel in not so pleasant. Not even my home is necessarily safe today. I prefer to stay home and travel by TV and the Internet. Google will take me anywhere on earth and outer space. Now that is really 'getting away'. Today it is possible to walk around world museums, National Parks, what your prescription will really do for you, make reference books obsolete, and so much more while I sit in a comfy Herman Miller chair. It makes me wince when someone says, "I don't need a computer." Even more maddening is, on phone, "Are you near your computer? Will you look up 'xxxx' for me?" from these same people. Ah, but this not the right place for that rant.