Doom, Gloom

Bring back Nomar. Bring back Dewey.

Woe is us.

The Red Sox are stinking up the joint. Except for beating on some college kids, they haven’t won a game yet.

We’ll take Roger, ‘roids and all.

They lost to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh!! The college kids could beat the Pittsburghs. But not this dismal collection of Red Flops.

What happened to the great teams of old? Gone. They lost to the Twins. They haven’t won a game at all. Ohhhh for 2009.

Ohhhh my breaking heart. Here we go again. More gloom and more doom.

All this and it’s only Spring Training.

(yay!!)
.

I’m In YouTube

Courtesy of my sons (I am like the guy in the Verizon commercial) I am blurbed in YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hruZ1KyqlKI

Cool

The Only Immortals

A chilling statistic was mentioned in The Hartford Courant’s story on its dumping 100 employees, including many, many from news.

“The cuts include about 30 writing, editing and news support positions, bringing the news staff to 135, down from 235 at the start of 2008.”

Forty-two percent of the staff gone in a year.

At its peak just a few years ago, the paper which used to cover most of the state of Connecticut and staffed a few of the national sports team and presumed to have someone in Washington, had nearly 400 people on that news staff. So it is, today, about one-third that size. Or, turning it around, two-thirds of the staff has vanished.

Yet surely defying the laws of physics if not those of the state of Connecticut, there are just about the same number of bosses today as there was during the earlier times. Not only do the same number of bosses — like Supreme Court justices in their protected status — boss around about 25 percent of the people actually doing work as before while they take up an achingly disproportional number of the remaining 135 on the payroll. And the paper as a whole.

Coult that be fair?

You should raise your child to be a boss. The boss will always have a job, even while others are destroyed. Hundreds and hundreds of people will go, and nearly none of them will be bosses. Someone, after all, has to lay off all those little people. It is a spur to ambition because  not only do the bosses make vastly more money for doing vastly less meaningful work but they are like college professors, tenured and immortal. A paper like The Hartford Courant which once inspired and followed the high level of expectations of an amazingly demanding, intelligent and engaged readership requires leadership; instead, it is inflicted with management.

Could that be fair?

Commenting on his latest body count, the Courant’s “publisher” Stephen D. Carver offers the muddled vision:

“I wanted to get us into an environment where we could focus on our readers and advertisers going forward, and focus on growing the business. We’re going to perform at the level we’ve been performing.”

Got that?

Well, no. If he is talking about the paper trying to somehow perform at the journalistic and commercial level it has been performing with two-thirds of its staff destroyed and the remainder in catatonia, then it is the fantasy of a madman. If he is talking about the management which he presides over performing at the level it has been performing then he promises only further ruination and calamity for the paper, its readers and loyal employees.

Quite a hope.

The Mardi Gras Massacre

A friend and I were exchanging e-messages last night when, finally, she had to stop. She said she was exhausted. It was so late already but she didn’t dare go to bed. She was afraid they’d call.

The “they” were the bosses of The Hartford Courant, my newspaper,  who, in a macabre dance of cruelty, were once more laying off people — but this time by phone. Inflicting a heartless companywide infestation of mass, pre-traumatic stress disorder they had already announced 10 days earlier that there would be further cutbacks and layoffs to come but refused to share details. They left the staff to hang in the wind for all that time, not knowing how many would be lost, who would go — leaving each to assume that he or she would be the victim this time.

Then in a particularly dead-hearted stroke the word went out that they would telephone the latest victims to tell them of their demise. They didn’t say who or how many. Every staffer was left with the horrid image of hearing the news in front of the family, of the children seeing the parent wrecked and ruined before their unfathoming eyes. It was not directed to a few but, indeed, made everyone suffer in dreaded anticipation, dignity vanquished as much as would be the careers of those who actually got the shiv in the back. 

This is not good management. This is loathsome and mean-spirited and casually cruel. The bosses there have plenty of experience in laying off the workers so it is hard exactly to imagine why they chose this gruesome way to deliver the news, to punish one and all in the process. Was the old way getting boring? Do they need variety in such things? They won’t say. It is impossible to respect such as that. Impossible.

Today, the surviving staff is looking to find out who is gone, phoning around, checking Facebook messages for clues. They don’t even know at this hour whether it is 10 or 50, six or 60. One is already too many but the cold business of doom by the dark-of-night telephone call is an especially despicable low road to travel.

The Low Country

Probably we shouldn’t be surprised that the Republican leadership, presiding over the remains of the party they murdered, hold fast to their views that mere people are dogs and lizards — even their own constituencies. It’s all they have left; contempt and disdain. That has always been the GOP way, the rich way, even when the party pretended to embrace the disenfranchised and downtrodden of the southern glens and hollows, luring them in with the song of race and embittement.

Today, that’s about all they have remaining, the Base, even as they turn on the Base itself — the people in the most need. The few moderates of the party have all fallen to the nation’s revulsion over the extremists of the GOP leadership and air-waves brown shirts. Better that the poor should remain poor, that those in trouble should remain in trouble, than that the rich should have a hair mussed by a government trying to help. Seldom has it been clearer that there’s a class war going on and, as usual, it is the rich warring on the poor. The GOP leadership is showing that, with a smirk.

It’s nearly amazing how blatant they are about it, too. The Democrats and progressives can nearly sit back and watch as the Republican leadership savages its constituencies. Yet how astonishing is it to hear even the Bush Family assail the Republican governor of Florida for seeking to help Floridians in trouble. Here is the governor and the federal government trying to repair the terrible damage created by George W. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress during their long reign of error yet the Bush family dares to criticize the governor for accepting help on behalf of his state. How low can these people sink?

Republican Low.

The governor of South Carolina is pleased to patronize his unemployed, allowing that he may pray for them rather than help them. So, too, the governor of Texas who would rather see his people go down in flames than accept money from Washington. Crystal clear: the people are on one side, the Republican leadership is on the other side. The idea that these figures would have the brass to lecture the rest of us after their failures, but to hold it against the victims is simply, well, Republican.

These are the forces, the Republican leaders and the bankers and Wall Street con men, who made this problem. Yet these are the people who are conning the country, copping attitudes of superiority over the wreckage they created. Some affect not being satisfied that the trillions coming their way might have some rules attached. Others refuse to accept responsibility for their own blunders. They are the guilty. Have you ever heard an innocent say, “Let’s not look backwards at the crimes we have done?” Of course not.

Their true colors are showing.

Check This Out

Here’s a neat Bluefoot production video (it’s only a minute) of a zippy promo for “The Dawn of Days”

Bag It

I’ve been reading in the papers how terrible a thing it is that the supermarkets give out plastic bags. A huge offense, that.

I agree and I agree with what the papers are saying so. I could be getting four or five such plastic bags a week, or more. The papers are right to point that out.

This morning yet again, my Hartford Courant and Wall Street Journal and the innards of the Sunday Times came in plastic bags. Four of them today. Over a week I get no less than 15 paper bags delivered by the newspaper companies.

Say, I’ve got an idea …

Conan Who?

In New York over the weekend, we took in a play. It is a nifty little number called, “Perfect Crime.” The play is the longest running non-musical in the city, having started back in April 1987. It is a mystery story and has been popular enough to last all these eons. Great fun.

Improbably, the play is set in Windsor Locks, Connecticut — amazingly billed as “an out-of-the-way, wealthy community.” When was Windsor Locks ever called that? As further proof that the New York drama queens have never set a foot in Windsor Locks or anywhere else in Connecticut, at one point in the very complex plot the protagonist invites a meddling local police officer to have dinner. In Hartford. “Pick me up at 10 and we’ll go into Hartford for dinner.”

The idea that anyone in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, only sets out for dinner in Hartford at 10 p.m. might seem quite natural to the wee-hour New Yorkers but it is totally laughable to anyone anywhere in ZIP codes beginning with 06.

This, of course, brings me to Conan O’Brien — and Jay Leno, for that matter. Whoever this Conan O’Brien is (his Connecticut ties notwithstanding) I have never once seen him. Live. Looking like a young Zbigniew Brzezinski, his present show “airs” at some incredible hour not much attended by your pal, Denis. Seemingly, if he actually exists at all, he will be moving into the time slot of Jay Leno, a time slot only slightly less late than his own. I do not watch JayLeno either. I am sound asleep when he comes on. I am sawing logs also when Jon Stewart’s wonderful show first is available.

I am not up at such hours. Seldom enough, either, do I head off to Hartford for dinner at 10 p.m. and later.

Happily, Jon Stewart is replayed the following evening at 8 p.m. More happily, someone invented the TiVo — a device, and its knock-offs, worthy of the Nobel Prize for Sleeping. I “tape” the “Daily Show” and watch it later. I have backed up installments dating back a year because I tape like crazy but don’t always get to see what I’ve so diligently captured.

Conan O’Brien a huge enormous gigantic talent? Maybe. But you can’t prove it my be. He is immensely popular with young, brain-addled types who stay up to all hours, and are left behind in the rest of life by the better-rested, fresher types who have sense enough to sleep the sleep of babes. Actually the sleep of babes is calculated to generate viewers for Conan O’Brien’s pre-rooster show — as babies alone wake up at the hour to howl for food and attention.

O’Brien is inching toward respectability (and vast wealth from those who reward him, people, themselves, who won’t admit that they never stay up to see him either.) Good for him.

I’ll still see him on TiVo.

More Than Pol Pot

Looking at my son Timothy’s pictures from Asia, “Textures,” on his Facebook account at the same moment as the trial opens of Kaing Guek Eav, the Khmer Rouge mass murderer — one of many — leaves me achingly puzzled, as usual. In that gloriously beautiful part of the world there is so much grace and so much gentle glory, and so much pain and vile monstrosity, as to reduce you to breathless confusion.

I know a little about Cambodia. I was there back in the old days, when the war was on. I have been back several times since, most recently with Tim and his brother, Dan, last year. I felt that they needed to see this, to know that such horror exists. It is not all that exists there, but we must know it exists.

Thirty years after the Vietnamese overthrew the vile and horrid Khmer Rouge, a few of the blood-drenched Cambodian genocide leaders are facing the beginnings of justice. So late if not at all too late.

Everyone knows about Pol Pot and his Cambodian killing fields. Or everyone should know about them. Amid the majestic aura of Angkor and the even more majestic loveliness of the Khmer people, Pol Pot and his followers slaughtered their neighbors by the millions. By the millions. In my first trip back after the sad place reopened I remember so well being shown this pile of skulls and that monument of bones, the impoverished nations’ only opportunity to honor so many dead. In their short-hand way, the Cambodians told us, “Pol Pot killed my father.” “Pol Pot killed my sister and my brother and my uncle.” “Pol Pot killed my mother and the priest and the school teacher.” Pol Pot killed everyone.

Just as “Hitler killed the Jews …” and “Stalin killed so many enemies …” “Cromwell killed the Irish …” Or, whatever the name is, “he killed so many Rwandans.”

Dead they are, but the people were not killed by Pol Pot and Stalin and Hitler alone, as much as we want to frame it so.

The Cambodians were killed, in fact, by their neighbors. Thousands and thousands of their neighbors in uniform. There is no evidence that Hitler came up short for prison guards and executioners to do his killing. Stalin’s gulag and murder centers were amply staffed with efficient Russians and others. The brutality, the violence, the murdermurdermurder never lacked for someone to do it. And they did it so “well.”

All those millions dead, dead at the command of some madmen in authority but dead all at the hands of sargeants and corporals and prison guards and others from the neighborhood. As much as we want to imagine that we are ultimately good by nature, so many simply are not. It is not a matter of a few from power, occasionally brought to trial; no, the killing fields are run by our cousins and friends and the guy next door.

There are not courts enough to consider the offenses of so many. Unless all is meaningless, we have to hope that there is a better court sometime to come for them.

NSA Bait

I’m surprised I haven’t been arrested and Gitmo’d by now.

Looking over what the Homeland Security people have said are the red flags over suspicious souls and watching too many CSI type forensic shows where the clue-coppers can haul in a suspect on clues invisible to mere mortals.

The Big Brother eye in the sky would squint at the truth that I have 334 different e-mail accounts scattered all over the place and I don’t know why. I have so many different passwords that 334 of those are accounts are suspiciously empty and traffic-free – not because I am awaiting the signal from Higher Headquarters but because I have forgotten how to get into them. I am in frequent and constant contact with unsavory characters, not all of whom are in-laws but so often newspaper types that even the terrorists wouldn’t allow into the cave. I have made a cheery career on being insufficiently respectful of authority, notably the authority that would be most annoyed at the shortfall. There is an extra tooth brush in the toothbrush cup at the sink and I have no explanation of why it is there. I engaged in wierd rituals and quirks, almost all associated with the Boston Red Sox but enough to attract attention from the mirthless arm of the law. I travel to suspicious places full of questionable people: Cuba, China, New York City.

Here’s a list from the Department of Homeland Security.

“DHS states “successful surveillance detection efforts require immediate reporting of incidents similar to the following:

• Multiple sightings of the same suspicious person, vehicle, or activity, separated by time, distance, or direction;
• Individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go;
• Individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular telephones;
• Individuals who order food at a restaurant and leave before the food arrives or who order without eating;
• Joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time;
• Individuals sitting in a parked car for an extended period of time;
• Individuals who don’t fit into the surrounding environment because they are wearing improper attire for the location or season;
• Individuals drawing pictures or taking notes in an area not normally of interest to a tourist or showing unusual interest in or photographing security cameras, guard locations, or watching security reaction drills and procedures; and
• Individuals who exhibit suspicious behavior, such as staring or quickly looking away from individuals or vehicles as they enter or leave facilities or parking areas”

Damp up the waterboard, sargeant. I am guilty of most of those. Probably, so are you. I see joggers all the time standing still. Spies? No, exhausted and exasperated that they got into this foolish jogging game in the first place. Talking extensively on a cell phone? Please, they’d arrest tw0-thirds of the nation. Improper attire? Sez who? Arrest Madonna.

Hopefully this sort of thing is under review w8th a new adminsitration. If the NSA will let them.