rob.nester

It's 5am, why am I awake? I'm sitting in Logan airport waiting on a plane to go to Florida where it is supposed to be forty-five degrees warmer than it will be in Boston.

A week of vacation serves as a prelude to my finally going permanent at my job; an event that will make me very happy.

I think that there should be two rules regarding airports:
1. Go ahead and give your children Benadryl. We don't want to hear your children at 5am. I don't care how cute they may be, it's far too early and I've not had enough coffee to deal with adults, let alone children.
2. Dear Preppy White Chick, don't seem surprised that airport security shows alarm when they discover the taser in your carry-on. Be glad that they didn't tackle you and leave you hog-tied in the "waiting area". Oh, and don't seem shocked when they inform you that it is a "deadly weapon".
3. Bringing a small yappy dog to the airport is ok. However, if you choose to do this, please realize that your fellow passengers do reserve the right to feed it any and all prescription medication they can find. Oh, and it us acceptable to kick you repeatedly for your decision.
4. I don't want to hear you rap while we are waiting on the flight to board. It has nothing to do with the fact that I'm White, or that I'm not a huge rap fan. It gas to do with the fact that you're rhythm sucks and your voice sounds like shit.

I'll post more during this trip, so until then, take care.

So, I don't really have cable television at the moment. Even when I did have cable, I never had the IFC Channel, so I missed what I consider to be one of the most important documentaries about American media in a number of years.

Let me start by saying that I like movies. In my younger days I worked at a video store. I loved the job; don't get me wrong, I hated it on certain levels too. By and large, I loved the exposure to movies. With the luxury of unlimited rentals I do have to say I indulged. I had seen a lot of movies however, long before working in a video store. My parents and I had ran through the majority of stock at almost all of the local independent video stores in our town by the time I was a senior in high school. With all this movie watching, I never thought about a very vital facet of movie production: the rating.

This Film Not Yet Rated, directed by Kirby Dick explores both the lack of transparency on the part of the MPAA in the assigning of movie ratings and for the lopsided nature in their views of sex, especially between heterosexual and homosexual or male versus female pleasure, and their views on violence.

I was completely unaware that the members of the ratings board for the MPAA were kept anonymous. The logic put forward for this by folks such as Jack Valenti and Joan Graves is that they must keep these decision makers free from pressure. I wonder if they think that the Supreme Court, members of Congressional Oversight Committees and other folks who have far more weighty decisions should be shrouded in anonymity? If so, it really makes me wonder about this world.

Oh, and if you should happen to rent this film, you can't really return it without watching the deleted scenes. They are great; Kevin Smith's discussion of Clerks receiving an NC-17 rating is funny. One of the most important deleted scenes however, is when Kirby Dick discovers that the MPAA has pirated his film

After talking with Joan Graves, who assures him that no one at the MPAA has a copy of the film, Mr. Dick receives a follow up phone call three days letter from Greg Goeckner, MPAA Lawyer, who states that he did in fact make a copy.

So, if I understand this correctly, the MPAA via it's lawyer, made an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work. According to the MPAA website, and I quote "[m]anufacturing, selling or distributing motion pictures or television programs without the consent of the copyright owner is illegal".

Wonder when they'll send themselves a court order?

Ok, so while there have been all kinds of stories about how we have to “live differently” since 9/11, a recent entry over at putative.com had me dumbstruck. Apparently the long and short of it is that even empty containers might be difficult to ship, at least via FedEx if they “look too much like bomb-making materials”.

Evidently, you might have trouble even if the empty containers claim to house things such as “certainty”, “uncertainty” or “gravity”.

Ironically however, the post does note that Uncle Sam's own shipping division, the USPS had no qualms about taking the wrapped up box of containers.

The only thing that I've read recently was this post about a German farmer who was apparently solicited by the North Koreans to supply them with his super huge rabbits for a food source. Seriously, when you start looking at giant rabbits for a possible primary meat source, isn't that a sign that your society is screwed?

Sundays have always carried some sense of melancholy to me. Perhaps it's that feeling of impending doom for the coming Monday and it's associated bad connotations. Anyways, to add to this I was reading over at BoingBoing about how the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will, on January 17, be moving the minute hand up on the Doomsday Clock for the first time since 2002.

The changing of the time is apparently in response to concerns that we might be entering a "Second Nuclear Age".

I think this would be considered a bad thing.

Last night I caught part of the Carlos Mencia show. Now after some initial qualms with Mencia and his brash comedy I have to say that I've grown to enjoy his show. The fact that he seems to rarely pull any punches in his humor is one thing that I enjoy. To that end he had a segment on the show that I watched last night entitled "Say Anything You Want" to celebrate freedom of speech, which I applaud.

Now what bothered me about this celebration of free speech you might wonder? Well, it wasn't the free speech. I'm a big proponent of free speech myself. What did bother me was something that one woman said during the segment. To paraphrase, this lady stated something along the lines of "well, most Southerners are stupid". Now, the way I took the comment was that it was a case of Mencia illustrating the biases of folks who would probably consider themselves "unbiased". None the less, this comment bothered me.

Having grown up in the South, the way that southerners have been perceived has bothered me most of my adult life. We don’t all speak slowly, we aren't stupid and we aren't all out trying to seduce our cousins. Personally I’m rather tired of having to defend being from the South. While I’m not necessarily a genius, I’m fairly confident that academically and intellectually I’m qualified to go toe to toe with most anyone, regardless of where they are from. I’m tired of people perceiving the fact that we in the south are more genial, more courteous and more laid back as signs that we’re of minimal intelligence.

While I can appreciate the humor of folks like Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and other comedians of the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” ilk, I almost hate the fact that folks from any other region than the South have been exposed to them. The reason for this is that, being a Southerner, while there is humor in the comedy you know folks like those in the jokes, like the guy who climbs the water tower to paint over his sister’s name in order to protect her honor, you also know that they aren’t necessarily stupid.

Am I trying to say that everyone in the south is a model of intellectual development? No. Honestly, we have folks that are just plain stupid here; the same as in the North. I mean, our location hasn’t got a thing to do with intelligence or lack thereof. The fact that we sound different when we speak doesn't mean a thing about our intelligence. Some folks are more intelligent than others, but be careful not to attribute intelligence or lack thereof to their location or the way that they speak, because it might just serve to show your own stupidity.

While I've never been too much on tv to begin with, this morning confirmed that tv has little, if any, redeeming quality anymore. Woke up fairly early this morning and while reading the news, I flipped on the tv and there was Ron Popeil hawking his steak knife set. I thought to myself, "Ok, whatever..." and went back to reading the news.

A few moments later I look over and there is another infomercial on that just disturbed me. Why you might ask? Because they were discussing "fecal weight". That's right, they were talking about how you can loose weight by using laxatives. "Colon Flow" - I mean, come on that just sounds bad.

*Turns off tv...*