Dick Cheney has a Constitutional right to shoot his friend in the face!
Oh, wait... he wasn't performing duties as part of an organized militia this weekend, at the time he shot his hunting buddy in the face!? Maybe Dickie is just trying to be the next Aaron Burr. Burr was Thomas Jefferson's Vice President who, in 1804, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton (the handsome guy who graces the $10 bill and was our nation's first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and John Adams).

Do I even have to mention that we haven't actually needed a militia to protect our shores from foreign invaders since the creation of our government's official military after the Revolutionary War ended in the late 1700's? Do I also have to point out that in our nation's 230-year history we (the people) have never needed to take up arms against our own government for reasons of tyranny? [Actually, that prospect might not be too far off in our future if things keep going the way they have been.]

The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America says the following:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

That's it. Period. The end.

As you can see, it says nothing about being a guarantee of an individual's right to keep a gun for sport, to hunt, or even to protect one's self, family, or property from criminals.

The sole purpose mentioned by our forefathers was that of forming and maintaining "a well-regulated militia".

Personal ownership of handguns, rifles, and bazookas is not covered here. This right extends to "the people", a collective term, not to the individual.

Before the Revolutionary War, the British didn't want the American colonists to have too much firepower, and this left Americans vulnerable not only to attacks by French, Spanish, and Native peoples, but to the heavy hand of British rule itself. That is why it was necessary, in the days before our new government had formed its own army and navy, to allow the (collective) people to bear arms in case of invasion, or in the event that our young government turned out to be as tyrannical as that which we were breaking away from. The weapons of this "well-regulated militia" could have been stored in a centrally located arsenal or armory, not necessarily in individual homes.

The details and semantics are debatable, but the wording of the Amendment seems pretty clear. Unless, of course, you are a gun lover.

The best quotes about the Cheney incident came from the man who was Ronald Reagan's Press Secretary, James Brady, and his wife Sarah:

• James Brady—"Now I understand why Dick Cheney keeps asking me to go hunting with him." "I had a friend once who accidentally shot pellets into his dog - and I thought he was an idiot."
• Sarah Brady—"I've thought Cheney was scary for a long time. Now I know I was right to be nervous."

And of course the late night talk show hosts had a field day with the whole brouhaha:

• David Letterman: "The sad part is that before the trip, Donald Rumsfeld denied the guy's request for body armor."
• Jay Leno: "When people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity [rose] to 92 percent."
• Jon Stewart: "Moms, dads, I can't emphasize this enough. Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted, it's just not worth it."

Just for a ha-ha or two, watch Cheney's Got a Gun.

Oh, and a "nother" thing
The other day I heard Katie Couric (a television broadcaster who is rumored to be in line to anchor the CBS Evening News,) use the non-expression, "a whole nother". There is no such word as "nother". For some reason people seem to think that they should split the word "another" between the 'a' and the 'n' instead of the 'n' and the 'o'. The word "another" is a combination of "an" and "other", not "a" and "nother". So if you're going to split the word to add a modifier (e.g. "whole") you should do it after the "an" (or "a", if the modifier doesn't start with a vowel)and before the "other". Now, Matt Lauer might make a grammatical slip on occasion, but that is a whole other, not a whole nother, story.

Britney is a good mom!
Early last week, Britney Spears was photographed driving away from a Starbucks with her 4-month-old redneck baby, Sean Preston, sitting in her lap.

Here's what Brit had to say in a Thursday "Access Hollywood" interview after getting a lot of negative attention: "I made a mistake and so it is what it is, I guess."

Although a Los Angeles County sheriff paid Mrs. Federline a visit (on behalf of the Department of Child and Family Services), authorities said they will not be pursuing any charges. I assume the reason for this is that the police themselves didn't witness the crime, but I bet they don't go so easy on most other trashy, careless, unfit moms when they find themselves in situations in which they totally disregard the safety of their infants.

I think that Britney needs to take some mothering lessons from her idol, Madonna. I bet little Lola and Rocco are always buckled up safely in the back seat.

Little Edie Beale is Hung Up
For Grey Gardens fans. This video shows Little Edie dancing to Madonna's "Hung Up": http://www.vimeo.com/clip=30761

TV shows from that past that I'd like to see on DVD
I recently discovered that "Grosse Pointe", one of my favorite short-lived TV series, will be coming out on DVD in March. It got me to thinking about other shows that I'd like to see honored with a DVD release. Some were great. Some were just cute. Here they are:

• "High Society" (1995-1996) starring Jean Smart, Mary McDonnell, Luigi Amodeo, Faith Prince, and Jayne Meadows
• "Homefront" (1991-1993) starring Kyle Chandler, Tammy Lauren, Ken Jenkins, Mimi Kennedy, and Kelly Rutherford; another site
• "Hail to the Chief" (1985) starring Patty Duke (as the first female U.S. President), Ted Bessell, Richard Paul, Joel Brooks, and Dick Shawn
• "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!" (2003) featuring Melissa Rivers, Tyson Beckford, Maria Conchita Alonso, Robin Leach, and Alana Stewart
• "One Foot in the Grave" (1990-2000) starring Richard Wilson and Annette Crosbie
• "Family Law" (1999-2002) starring Kathleen Quinlan, Christopher McDonald, Dixie Carter, Tony Danza, and Cristian de la Fuente
• "Cafe Americain" (1993-1994) starring Valerie Bertinelli, Sofia Milos, Jodi Long, and Luigi Amodeo
• "The Lot" (1999-2001) starring Holland Taylor, Victor Webster, Linda Cardellini, Jeffrey Tambor, Stephanie Faracy, Eric Stoltz, Rue McClanahan, and Jonathan Frakes

Bush telling the American people that we have to end our dependence on foreign oil is like...
...a pimp railing against prostitution.

Never have the big oil companies had a better friend in the White House than they do now. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita we've supposedly been in a bit of an oil crisis, yet Exxon reports record profits of over 11 billion dollars. If we're in an actual crisis then shouldn't they have reported losses or, at the very least, minimal profits? I've asked this before, but the matter begs further attention. The government should have stepped in and done something to prevent these companies from gouging, gouging, GOUGING the American consumers.

Maybe it's a strategy, though. Perhaps Bush is clever enough to know (NOTE: I don't really believe he is) that the only way to get the American people to accept things that are inconvenient is to wait until situations get so unpleasant that they/we realize that there is no other choice.

Can you imagine the pre-9/11 public putting up with the increased airport security restrictions that were put in place if the World Trade Center and Pentagon hadn't been attacked? No. It takes a major event or an effect on our pocketbooks to get us to accept major change.

So, maybe Bushie is letting gas prices go up so that we'll be so fed up that we'll all realize that we have to do something about oil consumption and dependence. If gas prices were to go up to $5, $8, $12 a gallon I'm sure that people would be a little more willing to trade their gas guzzlers in for something fuel-efficient and practical to get them from Point A to Point B.

Our lawmakers don't pass laws until we the people force their hands. Do you think that they willingly passed labor laws that would be very costly to the wealthy business barons who got them elected? Of course they didn't. It was only after so many children died in the workplace, women burned in hazardous sweatshops, and people got sick and tired (literally) of working 14 hour days, 7 days a week that anything was ever done by the lawmakers. In the early 1900's they were so afraid of the possibility that Marxism could spread and threaten their positions that they gave in just enough to satisfy the people.

The rich people who run the country don't make concessions to the little people out of kindness or because it's the right thing to do. They only act when they know that it's too dangerous not to. The same kind of pressure will be required to effect any change concerning our dependence on foreign oil, tax cuts that are fair to the lower and middle classes and don't favor the wealthiest 1% of society, social security reform, health care benefits for everyone, etc. Things only get accomplished when "the people" demand it and the oligarchs who lead this plutocratic corporatocracy of ours are frightened enough to give in just enough to calm us down.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was correct when he said, "It just wasn't credible to hear him talk about making America more secure and honoring our troops or making America energy independent or making health care more affordable without hearing him explain why he's done just the opposite for the last five years."

Bush will say some things because he knows that many people will believe that he means what he says, but his actions (or inactions) prove otherwise. But some people will give him points just for saying that we have to end our dependence on foreign oil, meanwhile he won't do one thing to follow through on the sentiment. When Jimmy Carter said basically the same thing almost 30 years ago the man meant it, but was unable to do anything about it. This guy says it, and he could probably do something about it if he really wanted to, but he has no intention to do diddly-squat.

The difference between "boy-toy" and "toy-boy" (yes, there is a difference)
Even with made up words and phrases there should be rules of usage. I was reading Ted Casablanca's "Awful Truth" column at eonline.com today and noticed that he refers to Ashlee Simpson's boyfriend as a boy-toy.

Anyone who remembers the 80's should know that a boy-toy is a girl, not a boy. Madonna popularized the term circa 1984 when she sported a belt buckle with her nickname, Boy Toy, on it. She herself was the boy-toy; a toy that is played with by boys. Boy-toy: the toy of a boy.

A toy-boy, on the other hand, is a boy who is played with like a toy. Toy-boy: a boy that is a toy.

Toy-boy commonly refers to go-go boys and/or the younger date-mates who keep older women or men company.

Since boys can certainly be the toys of other boys it's not necessarily incorrect to call a young guy a boy-toy, but you should only use this term if the boy in question is being played with by another boy. If he's being played with by a girl (like Ashlee Simpson), then he's a girl-toy (this term doesn't have the same cache, so I don't expect it to catch on).

If what I've laid out here before you isn't an official rule, it should be. If it has never been written down before for posterity, it has now.

"Teabag" is a four-letter word
Amy Sedaris was on "The Late Show with David Letterman" last Friday night and at the end of her segment she mentioned that she's recently added new "bite-sized blue-balls... with cheeses, and butters, and nuts, and such" to her cheeseball making repertoire.

Then she reminisced about how when she was growing up, sometimes supermarkets would give little extra gifts with some products and that these gifts usually had some tenuous connection to the purchased product itself: "Syrup would come with tape, because they're both sticky, or a glass with detergent... One time I remember my dad buying a bag of dog food and it came with a pair of knee-highs. What is that connection? I'm serious."

Well, she told Dave that she wants to think of some little gift to include with her bite-sized blue balls and she asked him for suggestions before offering one herself.

I know how Amy thinks, plus I could read her lips, so I knew that she said "teabags", but CBS censored the word!

People have been able to say "bitch", "damn", and "hell" on network television in prime-time for decades now, but you can't say the word "teabag" after midnight.

I guess the problem for the network censors is that Amy used the word "teabag" in conjunction with talk about her "bite-sized blue balls", but anyone who knows anything about the slang expression "teabagging" probably wouldn't be offended by it, and 98% of viewers probably wouldn't have gotten the reference at all.

Hi-LA-rious!

English as a second language
Maybe someday in the not-too-distant future we'll all be speaking English as a second language. Or maybe tvguide.com posted this news item just to point out how futile the efforts to save "Arrested Development", my current favorite TV comedy, might be:

Contra Viento y Marea (with 4.8 million viewers) bested Arrested Development's savage send-up of its struggles with Fox by about 500,000 viewers, while Alborada improved on that at 9 o'clock by drawing a full 4.9 million viewers. Did I mention that Univision programming is now included in the Nielsen's? S?!

Now, many of you know that I love my telenovelas, and "Contra Viento y Marea" happens to be the one that I'm currently watching every night, but it's a shame that what is arguably the best show on network television can't even beat a soap opera on a foreign language cable channel.

Movie madness
I spent the Christmas holiday weekend watching movies. I saw Brokeback Mountain, King Kong, The Producers, and Casanova in theaters, and watched the DVD of Dark City three times (the DVD has two commentary tracks that I wanted to hear after my initial viewing). I'm glad to report that I enjoyed everything that I saw.

Brokeback Mountain featured great performances by Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams.

King Kong was quite a cinematic achievement. I think that Peter Jackson could have cut out some of the many encounters with frightening creatures on Skull Island, though. It's a long movie, so we could have done without at least one or two of those scenes. Each scene was impressively crafted, but there were so many of them that it got to be a little exhausting after a while. Plus, these scenes didn't really do anything to move the plot forward at all.

The Producers was a lot of fun. Some people might not like the fact that it's very old-fashioned, but I loved that it was a throwback to the big-screen musicals of old Hollywood. I'll almost certainly never get an opportunity to see Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane reprise their roles onstage, so at the very least this film captures their great, but ephemeral, Broadway performances on film for generations to come.

After The Producers ended I sneaked into the theater that was about to show Casanova. The cast was great, and the story was frothy fun, but for me the real star was Venice itself. I'll see any movie that is set in Venice, but it's always a nice bonus to see something that also happens to be enjoyable.

And as for Dark City, it's been a favorite film of mine since it premiered in 1998 and I just wanted to see it again, so I borrowed the DVD from a co-worker.

Over the long weekend I also watched the 13-episode HBO series, "Epitafios", in a couple marathon sessions. It was filmed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for HBO's Latin market, but was so well-done and so well-received that they decided to show it on their regular plain-old HBO channel (it seems like there are about 50 different HBO channels now). I was able to watch it via HBO On Demand (yet another HBO option). [Note: "Epitafios" is currently being shown on the HBO Signature channel on Wednesday nights at 9:00pm EST.]

This show was exceptional. I only wish that I'd seen it when it was originally aired. For some reason they left episode #7 out of the On Demand queue, but at least I got to see the rest of them.

"Epitafios" was a very stylish thriller that gave me a genuine sense that anything could happen and that any characters could die at any moment. Usually when I watch a psychological drama about the hunt for a psychopathic serial killer I don't really worry very much about the main protagonists because of my certainty that they wouldn't/couldn't kill off a main character. But with "Epitafios" I didn't really have any such comfort at any point of the entire miniseries. It kept me on edge from the beginning of the first episode to the closing scene of the finale.

I have to admit that the killings are a bit Byzantine in the elaborate planning and details that would be required, and it's rather unbelievable that anyone could be so accurate at predicting the actions and reactions of the other parties involved, but if you suspend a little of your disbelief you'll be able to enjoy the ride. There's one trait of the killer (besides being a homicidal maniac) that bothers me because it's been done in movies and on TV cop shows too many times before [Hint: the folks at GLAAD could give you a list of movies that have gone down this road before], but I didn't let that color my opinion about the show's many merits.

Be warned that if you can't handle The Silence of the Lambs or any other movies that have Hannibal Lechter-like characters, you might have to look away from the screen at least once in each episode. This killer adds a sick sense of poetry to his murders, making them into macabre art installations with cryptic meanings.

Bravo to the writers, directors, cast, and crew! And thanks to HBO. I just heard that they're going to order a second season. I don't know how they'll manage it (perhaps a copycat killer), but when they've figured it all out and get it back on the air, I am so there!